Biknota
by dzha4225
Summary: What happens if animals never evolved on Earth in the first place? what kind of life will take it's place? what will the Galaxy react to a biologically strange version of Humanity that blurs the boundary between Synthetic and Organic Life? First Contact AU/Kerbal Space Program/Spore crossover
1. Chapter 1

Metazoans, or animals, as understood by us, are upon the simplest of all eukaryotes in terms of genetics and metabolism, originating from the primitive and simple Ophisknot Choanoflagellates, only being successful due to the accidental gift of multicellularity. On the other hand, Biknots, or specifically, the large complex supergroup known as SAR, or stramenopiles (heterokonts), alveolates, and Rhizaria were amongst the most genetically, structurally and metabolically complex of all cells.

What will happen, if instead of Ophisknots, the simplest among all cells, a member of one of the Most complex clade of cells, Ciliophora, or ciliates, were the ancestor of complex life on earth? What will happen to the galaxy when the Citadel met an entirely new category of sentient life that not even the Reapers have ever encountered? Will this new lifeform that blurs the boundary between synthetic and organic life finally be able to defeat the Reapers once and for all?

****Chapter 1 Origin of life****

****700000000 B.C. Pre Edicaran era.**** Where the timeline have diverged from the Canonical Mass Effect Timeline.

On earth, in the pre-Edicaran oceans, out of pure chance, a specific type of Flagellates, known as Dinophytes or Dinoflagellates, have gained from a bacteria, the ability to excrete a toxin that were deadly toward the clade of cells that were known as Choanoflagellates, the would be ancestor of animals as we know it. This toxin were a type of natural product that binds to a specific lipid on the animal cell membrane, punching a hole on the cell membrane and cause the content to spill out and the cell to die. This product was not biodegradable by the primitive life of the pre-cambrian earth. The accumulation of this toxin triggered a mass extinction, wiping out all members of the clade Holozoa, Will-be Ancestor of animals.

****450000000 B.C. Early Cambrian. ****

A ciliate, paramecium Bursaria, by accident, consumed an algae known as Chlorella, and retained the indigestible cell as an endosymbiont, enables photosynthesis of the micro-organism.

****420000000 B.C. Near the End of Cambrian****

Extensive sexual competition within the different groups of ciliates have fragmented the used-to-be simple clade into three major branches and thousands of different orders. Of one of the known branches, the branch Tetrahymena have developed a complex system of DNA editing and splicing that were turing complete-The macronucleus of this ciliate is officially a fully functional computer.

****400000000 B.C. The Ordovician Explosion ****

After the formation of the very first fully functional turing machine within the Macronucleus of a ciliate, the newfound ability to run advanced programming and algorithms have caused the cells bearing this computation system to rapidly evolve and diversify, and, by the start of the Ordovician period, all branches of modern life have been formed, from the tiny Picozoa to the Gargantuan Stentor. Big cells eats small cells and small cells eats smaller cells. cells that chases cells developed better and better propulsion systems and better homing algorithms to catch prey faster, and the cells that have been chased by other cells developed even better propulsion systems and advanced evasion algorithms to evade their predators. Life as we know it have entered a period of intense Evolutionary Arms Race.

****350000000 B.C. Late Ordovician Mass Extinction, and the origin of the First Nonvolatile storage medium****

Everything seems to be thriving in the Paleozoic oceans, until the inevitable happened-the continents Laurasia and Gondwana have finally merged into a single Supercontinent Pangaea. The new supercontinent is extremely dry on the interior-rainfall can not reach into the core of a massive piece of landmass, and consequently most forms of weathering and carrying of critical nutrients into the oceans by Terrestrial water flows stopped completely. The Oceans start to run out of nutrients.

The numerous Protozoa in the oceans starts to respond to this change by undergoing Conjugation-Sexual forms of reproduction that regenerates the macronucleus from the micronucleus. Unfortunatelly, this process also completely degrades the current macronucleus-wiping the memory of the genetic computer clean. Majority of the Ordovician life went extinct-much of their genetic information are only found in the macronucleus. However, Some of the more Extremophile, fresh water species survived: in order to survive in the constantly changing environment, these protists regularly undergoes conjugative or sexual reproduction, and consequently they stores all the changes within the macronuclear genome during the asexual stages of their life cycle as updates into the micronucleus prior to conjugation. This is the first example of an external storage device, better known as a hard drive, and by being able to pass it's current machine state to it's sexual offspring, these protists have survived the Late ordovician mass extinction.

****315000000 B.C. The Devonian Mass Extinction and the advent of land plants****

As the SAR supergroup constantly evolves via computation and gene transfer, another Kingdom of eukaryotes-the Archaeplastida, or better known as True plants, have evolved cell differentiation-cells at the surface of each colony becomes hard and dry, protecting the interior photosynthesizing cells from drying out. The Plants have officially landed, and within two millenia, the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels plummeted, starving the oceans of critical carbon sources for photosynthesis. Many orders and species starved to extinction, but the other, more Intelligent forms of life have survived, and their offspring have all the needed evolutionary pressure to grow smarter and smarter.

****300000000 B.C.**** Leviathans created the A.I. known as the Catalyst, as a mean to solve the problem of their organic servants constantly creating synthetics that wiped themselves out, leaving the Leviathans without a servant. The A.I. however, found a different solution, and proceed to systematically eradicate all organic life that is on the brink of creating synthetic life, encasing their genetic material in the form of reapers, the first to fall being the leviathans themselves. Oceanic photosynthesizers on the Earth developed structures to concentrate CO2 to RuBisCO within their chloroplasts, known as pyrenoids. Life begins to return to the vast ocean that surrounds Pangaea. Dinoflagellates and Diatoms begins to evolve their own forms of computation, and their complexity begins to skyrocket for the next 60 million years.

****240000000 B.C. The Permian Mass Extinction****

The Siberian traps have erupted-spewing billions of cubic kilometers of lava and ash into the atmosphere and oceans within the next 5 million years. But this type of flood basalt eruptions are fairly common in the earth's history, without causing mass extinctions before. However, deep within the oceans, something very small happened that forever changed the face of the earth. Since the dawn of life on earth, Bacteria have been fermenting sugary biomass from the land and from the top of the oceans into acetic acid for energy, which get converted into vast deposits of calcium acetate that gets piled higher and higher on the ocean floor-Reaching hundreds of meters on most of the world's seabeds.

This have been continuing unabated for 1.5 billion years, until a single archaeon Methanosarcina Acetivorans obtained the gene Acetate Kinase and Phosphoacetate Transferase from a nearby bacterium-Enabling the archaeon to utilize the abundant deposits of calcium acetate for methane production, decarboxylating the calcium acetate into calcium carbonate and methane for energy. The erupting siberian traps have injected billions of tons of nickel into the oceans, providing the Methanosarcina an abundant source of it's critical nutrient. The Methanosarcina grows exponentially, fueled by abundant acetate stocks and nickel, while The byproduct, methane, bubbles up the surface and reacted with oxygen both in the air and in the oceans. E.g. combustion. It was estimated that the entire store of calcium acetate was depleted in as short as 10 years, releasing chemical energy equivalent to the energy of all the sunlight reaching the earth in half a year. This massive energy release heats the entire earth up to 22 to 24 degrees C from a cozy 19-20 degrees C of the late permian, with the tropics reaching 36 to 45 degrees C-hotter than the average hot tub in most homes.

Nearly all marine life were either cooked or suffocated, and the majority of land plants and microbes also died out from the repeating explosions of methane that bubbled out of the oceans and were then ignited the erupting Siberian Traps volcanoes.

Some of the hardiest microbes, belonging to the Clade Alveolata, however, have survived the catastrophe, living on land in close association with moist soil and rivers, these organisms are the first organisms to reach land after Archaeplastica. The Mesozoic era have begun.

****150000000 B.C. The Rhizaria wars and the Mid Triassic Mass Extinction****

Deep within the oceans, something that closely resembles seashells in our timeline were thriving-these are Forams, Class Foramifera of the Kingdom Rhizaria, amoeboid lifeforms that builds themselves a hard shell made of either silica, calcium carbonate or simple sand. The sturdy shells of Foramifera enables them to sink to the bottom of the oceans, and their slow metabolism means that they do not require oxygen to survive and reproduce. These cells were polynucleate, having multiple cell nuclei within their cytoplasm, and as competing organisms were either cooked or suffocated during the Permian extinction, these Forams have reached absolutely massive scales-centimeters in length, instead of less than a milimeter that the biggest modern forams manages to get to.

As time goes by, the massive Forams eventually reached land, and have started to invade the freshwater ecosystems of the supercontinent Pangaea, which have started to break up. Rhizaria were formidable enemies of the land based Alveolata, and despite being less smart than the much smaller Alveolates(ciliates and dinoflagellates), wins by sheer size and strength, and by the tough shells they builds out of minerals that protects it's mass of nuclei and endoplasm.

An evolutionary arms race broke out, as these two forms of organisms are biologically too closely related to each other, there are no effective antibiotics that will kill one and spare another. Consequently, the warring sides depends upon more traditional weaponry-Dinoflagellates fires miniature harpoons out of their "mouths" to puncture the hard shells of the Forams, Ciliates develops long necks tipped with nematocysts that injects a deadly poison into the exposed parts of the Forams, killing the entire organism through a single touch, and the Rhizarian forams uses long, web like tendrils to mop up any cells that happens to be too close to itself and consumes it, even their own kind. The war escalated until one side of the battle developed a highly specific, targeted attack molecule-Immunoglobin or Antibodies. The Adaptive Immune System have been born. This new class of molecules are so effective in homing into and killing their intended target, that the species that developed this new weapon, Paradileptus, first eradicated the entire Foram Order, and turned against it's own allies-nothing could stop it. In the end, nearly 75 percent of all species perished in the ensuring Conquest, until Ciliophora have once again secured world dominance until the end of the Mesozoic.

****6450000 B.C. Cretaceous Mass Extinction and the first true eyes****

It was estimated, that, the Mass relay near Pluto in the solar system was built during this period-with Devastating consequence. As a new gravitational source that is the Charon relay activated, it flung small kuiper belt objects toward the inner solar system, one of which struck Earth. The small object struck a formation of Gypsum-a mineral rich in sulfates. The energy of the impact vaporized the entire formation, sending a cloud of sulfur oxides and rock vapour into the atmosphere. The earth was first heated to Oven like temperatures as the debris from the impact reenters the earth's atmosphere, incinerating much of the life on land, and then cooled to below freezing as the cloud of sulfur oxides blocks out the sun for thousands of years. Most Archaeplastida plants died out, as the leftover sunlight is insufficient to support photosynthesis for a sessile organism that can not active track the sun, taking much of the land and ocean food chain with it. Organisms that CAN track the sun, like the Euglenoids of the kingdom Excavata and certain Dinoflagellates, and Paramecium Bursaria, however, managed to continue photosynthesizing as their primitive eyes (came from a modified chloroplast) sensed the direction and intensity of the light and told the flagella/cilia of the organism to move toward the light source, a process called Phototaxis. The genes for these first eyes were, just like every gene, swiftly taken by predatory dinoflagellates and a ciliate called Dileptus, which evolved and improved the primitive design further into a structure called the Ocuelid, a structure that contains a crystalline lens and a fully formed retina with it's own high speed chemical electromechanical neural network computer to process the highly diffracted image into useful data for predation-it helps the cell to aim it's predatory appendage, a sort of tentacle-on-a-spring towards it's prey, and can also process polarized light to aid in finding transparent prey cells. The first form of high speed computing was created in these cellular eyes.

****3700000 B.C. ****An Unknown civilization fired a mass accelerator slug towards a reaper, puncturing it and disabling it. The slug traveled across lightyears and then landed on the planet Klendagon creating the geological feature known as the Great Rift Valley.

The High Speed electromechanical Chemical computer first developed in the Ocuelid have been adopted by a type of ciliate and at least three types of dinoflagellates and Stramenophiles, as well as some members of the Kingdom Cryptophyta. The Ciliate Nassula Ornata Uses this high speed computer to help plot it's route toward different particles of food, including cyanobacteria, which causes the food vacuoles inside the microorganisms to display an array of different colors in correspondence to the stages of digestion Of the food within, while the Stramenophile Coccolithophores uses the High speed computing capability to interpret disturbances in the local water flow, helping it to evade predators.

****10000000 B.C.**** Certain types of Stramenophiles, known as Heliozoa, develops the ability of extending multiple spike like appendages supported by microtubules, called Axopodia, to propel itself, aid in cell division and catch prey. This paved the way for "True" motile land organisms that does not require at least a thin film of water to survive and move on land.

****5000000 B.C.**** the Gene for Axopodia have been transferred to a Ciliate and a Stramenophile. These "legged" protists are optimized to "walk" on surfaces both below and above water, greatly aiding in dispersion of the organisms.

****2500000 B.C.**** a type of Amoeba, known as Myxozoa, have reached land. These Slime molds forms complex networks of tendrils and tubules to feed on decaying matter, connecting different food sources in a highly optimized pattern whose efficiency even the Galaxy's best railroad designers could not match by their design.

****100000 B.C.**** The Innusannon, which built the ruins on Ilos, were wiped out by the reapers.

Certain types of land capable Ciliophora and Dinoflagellates starts to reproduce on land-these land-adapted organisms produces a thick cell wall made of wax ethers and cellulose, preventing water loss, while the internal Glycocalyx attached to the cell membrane absorbs water from the air through a process called deliquescence. Diatoms, whose silica based shells being nearly impermeable to water, starts to move or glide across land.

****50000 B.C.**** The Protheans, thought to have built the mass relays and the citadel, disappeared mysteriously without a trace. On the land, in many different habitats, certain type of Axopodia-bearing Ciliates have begins to show signs of sentience. Their Macronuclei performs much of the thought process, while a complex network of microfibrils and microtubules forms a mechanochemical computer that handles all the immediate reaction to different stimuli. These cells are about 2.5 millimeters in height, and each of their macronuclei can store up to 1.22 Terabytes of data. Axopodia forms miniature manipulative "fingers", and bundles thereof forms "limbs". even though they were just a single cell, they displays a bipedal body plan without a head, with an oculeid situated in the cell body-the "torso" part of the organism. Although generally adopting a Bipedal body plan, They can extend axopodia and Pseudopodia from anywhere on their cell membrane-They can undergo a limited form of shapeshifting. there were no lungs-an organism this small get all their oxygen supply through diffusion alone. Feeding is through Phagocytosis, with Axopodia capturing food particles and prey and pulling it toward the cell body to be consumed. These organisms starts to call themselves "humans".

25000 B.C. the Asari culture have entered the Feudal era. The nascent asari civilization, influenced by Prothean culture, built temples that enshrines prothean artifacts, hiding them behind religious objects and imagery.

The First forms of technology have been developed by the humans-a programmable macromolecule/natural product synthesizer situated in their cytoplasm that produces molecules of the desired shapes and functions from 3 dimensional designs stored in the form of RNA. This organelle, dubbed "Omnisome", forms the basis of Nanotechnology, a technology that is extensively used only by the humans in the galaxy.

CODEX:

Human sensory systems

In their most primitive forms, the Humans have two different sensory system that is not specific to chemistry: Visual and Tactile. The Human Visual system is limited by Diffraction-because the microscopic size of the Ocuelid (being about 250 times the wavelength of most types of visible light), the human visual system requires heavy neural interpretation and interferometry across multiple positions in order to form an image, and even through this complex process, an average human could only see the outside world in a meager resolution of about 180x180 pixels, 300x300 in the best case. Impressive for a single cell, but practically useless for anything other than the simplest forms of CV applications like finding prey or guiding path.

In order to make up for the limits of Cellular vision, The Basal Human cell have an Impressive tactile system-Microscopic mechanical sensors tips every Axopodium functions as a natural form of Atomic Force Microscopy, relaying the force applied to them to the Cell's High speed Computation unit through millions of microscopic fibrils known as Microfilaments. Combined with an intricate Digital to Analog converter built into the basal bodies of every Axopodium(a mechanical action at a long distance away produces less effect than one that is closer), the Human tactile system can feel, in the most controlled case, individual atoms on a surface, and could tell most different substances apart through Touch alone.

****7000 B.C.**** The Asari have discovered in the serpent nebula, a Large ancient space station they called "Citadel", and a counsel have been set up on Citadel for dealing with other spacefaring cultures in the milky way galaxy.

The last Pleistocene Ice age have officially ended, Marking the beginning of the Holocene. As the Temperature of the earth warms up, dormant colonies of Humans thawed from the receding glaciers, and the temporarily paused development of the Human civilization have resumed. GranZymes and Perforins were developed before the last glacial period, primarily as a mean to hunt down Land and Ice dwelling Diatoms. However, as the output of the Sun have resumed normal levels, Land dwelling Dinoflagellates have started to dominate the ecosystem, primarily due to it's ability to photosynthesize using only atmospheric moisture and carbon dioxide as a feed stock while being exposed to high levels of light. As Perforins were proved Ineffective against Dinoflagellates because they have a thick Cellulose based cell wall, Cellulases, which the gene that codes for it were taken from bacteria, were adopted into the growing arsenal of nanotechnology of the growing human population.

****5100 B.C.**** The Krogans learned to split atoms, and proceeds to Nuke their homeworld Tuchenka into a Nuclear winter.

First Human nations were established near seas, creeks and lakes on the continents.

****5000 B.C.**** Salarians Joined the Citadel council. Their Scientific expertise proved incredibly useful during the early expansion into the terminus systems.

****4600 B.C.**** The Citadel council accidentally opened a relay to a system controlled by a ravenous Insect race, the Rachni, the ensuing war lasted 300 years as the Citadel council lost system by system to the rachni.

Humans that lives near modern Mesopotamia learns to consume plant cells by cutting the cell walls using individual Axopodia tipped with the Cellulase and Hemicellulase acquired through a horizontal gene transfer from Streptomyces spp. ,a type of bacteria.

****4300 B.C.**** The Salarians found the Krogans in the middle of a nuclear winter, and Uplifted them to interstellar flight. The krogans prove extremely important in fighting the Rachni, as they can easily adapt to the underground caverns of the Rachni worlds and hunt down their queens with ease. By 4000 B.C. the rachni were completely eradicated. Due to the bloodshed of the rachni war, the Citadel council enacted a law that forbade the opening of dormant mass relays without knowledge of the other side of the relay.

****3800 B.C.**** Genetic drift have separated the Human race into three distinct species, primarily distinguished by their skin color, but also by the subtle differences of the Surface glycoprotein antigens on their outer membrane. Conjugation between the different species are no longer possible. These three species will eventually be called Whitelight, Redlight and Blacklight.

****3000 B.C.**** Krogans were one of the most adaptive species in the galaxy, Only limited by the harsh environment of their homeworld. As the Salarians lifted them out of their homeworld, Other planets in the galaxy proved to be extremely hospitable to the Krogans, Effectively making the Krogans an invasive species. By 3000 B.C., The Krogans have constantly demanding for new worlds to colonize. The citadel council could no longer tolerate this, and as a result, the Krogans Forcibly attacks many worlds Controlled by the citadel council using redirected asteroids. The Krogan war have begun.

The Minoan warm period have Officially begun on earth, the Increase in rainfall coupled by the melting of High altitude glaciers caused Flash floods across the entire earth. Many of the terrestrial Human colonies were flushed off the land, But the individual Human organisms were not killed, as their physiology can easily tolerate and even adapt to Aquatic environments in the oceans. Some of the humans that have re-entered the Oceanic habitats have acquired Plastids that were derived from Diatoms, Cryptophytes and Dinoflagellates, Enabling them to make many of the natural products that were derived from plants, Including Chlorophyll and Luciferin from the Dinoflagellate Noctiluca Scintillans. These aquatic cultures brands themselves as Atlantis, the Inhabitant Atlanteans. First signs of bioluminescence were discovered and utilized by some of the Atlanteans.

****2400 B.C.**** The Turians Discovered the Citadel council and were swiftly integrated into the Council, functioning as the Military forces of the Council. They are able to resist the Krogan rush through the use of their highly advanced military doctrines and their Mighty fleets, cutting Krogans back system by system. However, as the Krogans can lay up to 1000 eggs per year, this fight were never-ending, and even the Turians could not hold against them Indefinitely.

Bioluminescence were adopted through horizontal gene transfer, to much of the Human population. Being naturally suited to their Binary, Algorithmatic system of thought, Bioluminescence quickly replaced the long range quorum Sensing system as the De Facto mean of communication between Distantly spaced Human colonies both on land and in the Oceans.

As the Microscopic Ocuelid of the equally Microscopic Humans are Limited by diffraction (they can not see the world very clearly in the visible wavelengths), Evolutionary pressure Strongly Drives the directional emission of light as a mean to minimize Crosstalk and Improve range of the Bioluminescent Communications. The Atlanteans, Being pioneers of Bioluminescent communications, were the First to develop the process of Light Amplification by Stimulated Emmision of Radiation as a mean to produce directional light. In another word, the Atlanteans have invented the first biological lasers.

The organelle for emitting lasers were derived from the Scintillons of Dinoflagellates, Consisting of a self assembled core of chlorophylls and carotenoids surrounded by a layer of H+-sensitive Luciferases, flanked by multiple membranes that functions as a Distributed Bragg Reflector. The Luciferases inject a torrent of Excitons into the carotenoids surrounding the core in response to an influx of Hydrogen ions, which then transfers the Excitons into a nanoscopic tube of Chlorophylls within the Core as a long-lived Triplet state. This triplet state is what ultimately undergoes stimulated emission, producing laser light in the range of red to orange wavelengths.

****2100 B.C.**** The Salarians have created and deployed the Genophage-a Genetic weapon that reduced the fertility rate of Krogans to 1 1000th of their previous rate. The Krogan rebellion have been successfully contained.

****2000 B.C.**** The Krogan rebellion have officially ended as the Krogan Homeworld Tuchenka have been occupied by Citadel forces and designated a DMZ(Demilitarized Zone).

****0 A.D.**** Multiple networking protocols have been invented and used by the various Human cultures on earth, which includes WCDMA, TCP/IP, 802.11f/g, Bluetooth and Zigbee. These protocols Differs in the way the information is encoded during transmission, the first asymmetric Encryption protocol, RSA have been developed to secure communications.

****1000 A.D.**** The Concept of the Atom have been proposed by one of the Redlight scientists, Junes De Ravaeich. This concept unified the various previously unrelated ideas of Nanotechnology together, Beginning the historical event known as the Industrial Revolution.

****1500 A.D.**** X-ray Crystallography have been invented by members of the Atlantean Species, This newly discovered tool enables the precise determination of various enzymes and biochemical reaction mechanisms that were previous locked away from Touch and experimentation inside the Shielded active centers of the enzymes themselves. A Major overhaul of the Omnisome have been started, incorporating the newfound discoveries regarding enzymatic reaction mechanisms.

****1611 A.D.**** Major metabolic pathways of much of the Earth's biosphere have been completely recreated using Nanotechnology, replacing the fragile Proteins that were previously used by Most of the different species of Humans (Homo spp.). self assembled Constructs are extensively used by the various Human cultures, which includes the First forms of Cities (macrostructures about 10 meters across)

****1664 A.D.**** the Haber Bosch process have been invented by the Whitelight ( ), using iron Oxides as a catalyst, a mixture of nitrogen and hydrogen gases are pumped into the interior of electrically heated multi-walled carbon nanotubes(MWCNTs) filled with microscopic grains of Magnetite using ATP powered pumps specifically designed for this purpose. In the interior of the nanotubes, The hydrogen and Nitrogen reacts on the surface of partially reduced Iron Oxides, forming Ammonia. The Haber Bosch process produces a nearly unlimited supply of fixed nitrogen for the Humans to use for growth and construction, which caused their population to explode. These Haber-Bosch reactors are nearly 350 microns in length, covered in multiple layers of refractive polymers that functions to keep the heat inside, and are about the size of a Human arm(microscopic). photosynthesis have been used as a major food and energy source in many major cities.

****1880 A.D.**** The Morning war have broke out after a Geth unit asked a Quarian "Does this unit have a soul?" the Quarian panicked and tried to shut down the Geth, which chased the Quarians off their Homeworld, Rannoch, in self defense.

The Combined Photosynthetic System have been invented by a Blacklight( ) individual, Thomas Edison, Using a combination of both Plant and Microbial Enzymes, This new photosynthetic Cycle bypasses RuBisCO and The associated inefficiency of Photorespiration. Using a Combination of the 3-Hydroxypropionate Bicycle and the Glyoxalate Cycle, providing Unmatched efficiency of 61.5 percent by Light energy, Highest of all known forms of photovoltaic/photosynthetic systems.

The Atlanteans grew worrisome as the Land based Human populations have started to expand into the Oceans on massive floating platforms constructed from Polyethylene, Blocking off the necessary Sunlight needed for the Atlanteans to Photosynthesize.

****1908 A.D. The Atlantean war have begun in the earth******'******s Oceans.****

As the competition between and became more intense, total War broke out between the surface Dwelling Humans and the Aquatic Atlanteans. The Atlanteans developed the first weapons-grade laser systems. Combining trillions of Light Organs and Tons of Biomass, these powerful lasers cut holes clean through the Polyethylene cell walls of the Constructs, causing them to sink, and the contents of the Constructs Consumed. While the Blacklight Wins simply by sheer number-The Much more Advanced Photosynthetic Systems of provided the Land dwelling Human populations a nearly Unending source of biomass and therefore Military Forces. Toxins that rips holes on Eukaryote Cell membranes were Synthesized by the Gigaton and dumped into the Oceans, causing the Atlanteans's Cell membranes to rupture and their contents to spill out, While the Floating Constructs of protects them from making contact with their own Toxins.

1915 A.D. End of the Atlantean war and the Holocene Mass Extinction

At the end of the Atlantean war, The Aquatic Atlanteans finally succumbed to the unending attacks thrown out and Toxins dumped by the Land/Surface Humans, and demanded a Truce with the Terrestrial world. However, the Damage of the war was already incredibly significant-nearly 85 percent of all aquatic Eukaryotes were lysed by the Powerful toxins meant to damage the Atlanteans, with only species that Possesses a Thick cell wall or are Multicellular in nature surviving Lysis. Most of the seawater have became Unusable for non-Human lifeforms, and will stay this way for the next 150 years. This is the Humanity's Extinction event.

However, the Terrestrial Ecosystem, which were the home to the Land based Civilization that won the war, were largely unaffected, untouched and unaware of the Holocaust in the Oceans, and will eventually give birth to a Unified Human civilization that will Take to the stars.


	2. Chapter 2

****CHAPTER 2: The Space Race**** ****1961 A.D. First Human Spaceflight attempts and the Emergence of Multicellularity****

The Atlantean War was Distant past for the newly formed international order-History and even evolution were Incredibly fast for a Genus of microbes whose life cycle were measured in days. (the Cell cycle length of an individual Human organism)

Now colonized nearly every part of the earth, and all but completely Out-competed and Consumed the local ecosystem through their Highly efficient Photosynthesis and Metabolism, Humanity starts to look toward the Stars.

The first attempts of spaceflight were based on balloons-microscopic sacs of protein filled with Hydrogen gas, each carrying an individual cell. The balloons floated up and up, the cells noticing the Surrounding temperature gets colder, the pressure getting lower, until an Upper limit in height have been reached, above which no cells have returned. The desiccated remains of the cells that went too high were found by other adventurers, and their Reconstruction algorithms quickly deduced that these cells were killed by Dehydration and Suffocation as the air became thinner and the moisture became more scarce as the height increases.

Land plants, they thought, were multicellular, and the cells on the outside have specialized to keep water inside the organism while receiving nutrients from inside of the organism. They thought, that, probably ,We can do the same.

New balloons have been launched, this time with a cluster of cells that were programmed in such a way, that the outer layer of cells were programmed to resist evaporation of water, and the Inner layer of cells are programmed to hold in Water and Sugars, providing the outer layer of cells their needs. These balloons raised to heights that no other cells have ever reached before, but the air have became so thin that even the Biggest envelopes could not provide enough lift to go higher. Humanity have concluded that Balloons were not the correct way to go above and beyond earth.

****1964 A.D. Von Braun, Cell differentiation, Colonialism and Rockets.****

Although the first attempts of spaceflight were unsuccessful, their lesson of Multicellularity were an important legacy-Cells within a Human colony starts to become Specialized-Some cells morphed to large flat planes to capture Sunlight for photosynthesis, Some cells Bloats up to store nutrients, Some cells Elongates to penetrate deep underground for minerals and other cells grew Flagella, Cellular appendages that were long forgotten by the Human race to swim and travel long distances. However, this form of cell differentiation was not permanent-Cells that were differentiated can De-differentiate to serve other roles, and every cell can take the role of every other cell if needed. This form of Multicellularity is known as Colonialism: Cells work together and specialize to do jobs that the individual cells can't do, yet each individual cell are fully Pluoripotent-any cell type can become any other cell type to serve the needs of the Colony if needed, and Every cell can live individually by themselves just as well as they can live in colonies.

In this general environment, one genius Redlight( ) individual, Wernher Von Braun, Invented the first rocket based on the principle of Reaction forces-The same forces that flagellates and ciliates uses to propel itself forward in water. In order to propel oneself without the aid of air or water, one must throw something away from the direction it want's to go. The faster the object is being thrown, the more impulse it gives to an individual.

First contraptions were compressed protein springs, powered by the Strain energy stored within it's Molecular structure, these springs launches themselves at nearly 250 meters per second, flinging the cell that launched the spring high up in to the air. But this was not enough. It was clearly found, that it will take more than just a single cell to reach the height the balloons once reached, let long to reach above it.

Multiple cells were used in the next attempts, each cell launching itself away from the ascending mass using the molecular springs, propelling the greater mass in the process. The resulting "rocket" have reached height of several Kilometers-a lot higher, but still not higher than the Balloons the first adventurers used.

Seeing that the springs could not possibly give higher Exhaust velocities, Von braun turns to Chemical reactions for propulsion. Decomposition of hydrogen peroxide, a common liquid produced and used extensively in Biology, it thought, would produce exhaust velocities faster than the springs could produce through decomposition into steam and oxygen. However, the Highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide Cooked the cells that attempted to use it for propulsion as it decomposed. Von braun proceeds to use multiple cells to construct a large cylindrical chamber using material that it knows will not cook in the heat of decomposition, and then filled it with Hydrogen peroxide. As the cells released the hydrogen peroxide into a bed of Catalase according to their programming, the cylindrical contraption launched itself high into the air-then proceed to tumble uncontrollably and crash into the same city it was launched from, exploding into tiny pieces and taking a decent proportion of the city with it.

"At least the propulsion system worked as expected." thought Von braun. Now let's try to control it.

Humanity have, for the first time in the past 100000 years, and probably for the first time in the earth's history, encountered what we know as Aerodynamics. But Humans are quick learners, realizing the greatly increased Reynolds number have meant that objects in the size range of meters no longer stops immediately once you have stopped Pushing on it, Aerodynamic designs were quickly simulated, tested and iterated. Three months later in the same year, Wright brother, an Atlantean, succeeded to launch Humanity's first rocket above the atmosphere. On the suborbital trajectory, Wright attempted to throw an object out of it's Rocket, and found out that it continues to move away from the rocket, without ever stopping or slowing down, in the absence of air. This is Humanity's first direct observation of the Newton's first law of Motion-An object that is not subject to outside forces will either stay still, or maintain uniform motion in a straight line.

CODEX: The Human Concept of identity

Humans, like most types of protists in the Clade Ciliophora, engages in two different forms of reproduction: Asexual reproduction and Sexual reproduction or Conjugation. During Asexual reproduction, the Micronucleus divides by Mitosis, and The Macronucleus divides by Amitosis, preserving it's Machine states to both of it's offspring-Genetic circuits maintains their states, and the Multiply redundant Internal Computer Memory(edited through the use of gRNA and CRISPR-CAS9) is duplicated and partitioned equally to the two daughter nuclei. The discrepancies in the copy numbers of chromosomes in the two daughter genome quickly fixed through on-demand replication, with ONE of the daughter nuclei, the one that will bud off the mother cell, identifying itself as the daughter cell through recognition of a specific chemical signal present only in the direction of the will-be new cell, and performs the required actions according to the programming for daughter cells through the calling of an API function in the OS library.

As a consequence, a Human cell that underwent Cell Division maintains Ontological Continuity, and are generally recognized as the same individual. This is especially true since the Atlantean war, as different cells from the same cell line that lives in close association with each other communicates extensively through the use of Extracellular RNA signaling and through Bioluminescent communication, making a large single-lined Cell colony more akin to a multi-core computer than to a computer network. Separated masses of cells works autonomously, but they can rejoin to the same individual providing they were not separated for too long.

The formation of new individuals happen through these two ways: Sexual reproduction and Speciation. In Sexual reproduction, Two cells joins together, compresses their macronuclear memory and stores them into their micronuclear genome as updates according to a specific algorithm. Then they exchange one of their micronuclei, completely degrades their macronuclei and then reform the macronuclei from the Combined genetic material of both the retained and the swapped micronucleus together, applying patches as it does so.

In Speciation, two separated masses of cells from the same individual cell line are prevented from rejoining for more than one cell cycle. This breaks the ontological synchronization between the two separated cell lines as the pre-separation commands within each individual cell mass are executed and cleared from their runtime memory. The result are two individuals that can no longer rejoin in to the same mass, with each individual carries all the memories of the unseparated individual, yet are ontologically separate from each other.

****1965 A.D. The Modular Body for Space Operations in a High-Reynolds Number Environment****

One year after the first successful Suborbital flight and the discovery of the three laws of motion, The entirety of Humanity is in a sort of Space Frenzy-just like the Space race between the U.S. and the Soviet union in our own timeline, nearly every Research effort have been on to the development of better, Orbital forms of rockets, ultimately ending in the Colonization of the solar system.

A Blacklight individual, Alex Mercer, have developed a successful protocol for bridging the Microscopic scale that most Human cells operates on to the Macroscopic scale that is required for performing successful spaceflight. This protocol is known as Hierarchical self Assembly of Elements Semi-Uniquely Labeled through the use of Tandem ARrays, or HAESULTAR, it uses the Surface antigens present on every Human cell, Subdividing the antigens into a series of 7 segments, Uniquely and Sparingly presented on each cardinal direction of every cell. As the individual cells moves across the growing construct, each cell recognizes the surface antigens of the pre-existing construct and Begins to differentiate according to the local combination of antigens, assuming different roles and displaying it's own antigens according to a hierarchically structured structural blueprint stored inside the cells' Genome. The end result is an arbitrarily sized construct that is accurate down to the Atom-something that is large enough to withstand the harsh conditions of Outer space, yet Precise enough to be able to actually get to there without blowing itself up in the process.

A later innovation, produced by an Atlantean only known by it's Code name PARIAH on the informational networks of Humanity's nations, augmented the HAESULTAR protocol to Pattern and produce Non-cellular materials, things like metals, ceramics, crystals, Plastics and Nano-Carbon materials for making Sturdy hulls and heat-resistant Components, as well as Assemblies of Molecular Nanotechnology that is used in functions that cells could not perform, like lasers, batteries, Chemical reactors and Ion engines. The Augmented protocol, known as Sequential Deposition of Diverse Heterogeneous Materials through Molecular Templating, SDD-HMMT, marks a major innovation of Humanity's ability of production.

A gigantic (in the human scale) construct begins to form on the west coast of the continent known in our timeline as North America, dubbed "Kentucky Space Center" or KSC. Supplied by biomass synthesized and minerals extracted on the entire continent, The KSC were the Single Largest construct ever produced by any lifeform in the entire earth history. However, due to the greatly improved production power thanks to the HAESULTAR-SDD-HMMT protocol of multicellularity, the construct, measuring in 2.21 kilometers x 1.6 kilometers x 320.384 meters and weighing 125.84 Kilotons, were erected within months.

Within the KSC, dedicated production lines 3D prints massive inorganic components of the will-be rocket ships of Humanity using the SDD-HMMT process, while specially crafted chemical reactors produces and refines the volatile chemicals that will serve as the rockets' fuel. The first attempted orbital rocket, codename Atlas-Agena, is already under production.

CODEX: The MOdular Body for Space Operaions in a high-Reynolds Number Environment (MOBSORNE)

MOBSORNE was a design philosophy, or concept, that denotes the specific sets of designs and construction tools that are needed to operate on a macroscopic scale in the range of Meters, The basis of which were the Newton's Three Laws of Motion:

An object that is not under resistance will either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force.

The vector sum of the forces F on an object is equal to the mass m of that object multiplied by the acceleration a of the object: F=ma.

When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.

These three laws are only applicable at scales two orders of magnitude larger then most Human cells, and therefore, a normal Human will not experience these laws during it's daily life, and these concepts were only relevant on the scales needed for Spaceflight.

Despite being able to adopt different body designs that are often highly specialized in nature, a Human "individual" can shift between different designs at will in a relatively short timescale and modify/improve their macroscopic bodies in real time, due to the general Pluripotency of Human cells, and the ability of said cells to undergo directed differentiation in real time(60s) at will.

CODEX: The general physiology of an individual Human(Homo spp.) Cell

The sentient colonial protists, calling themselves "humans", are classified in the following order:

Domain: Eukaryota

Clade: SAR

Kingdom: Alveolata

Phylum: Ciliophora

(unranked): Ocuelidophora

Class: Axopodiophora

Order: Saccharomucophores

Family: Stereociliophorae

Genus: Homo

(unranked): Aneucytoformes

Species: Homo Atlanteus (Atlanteans, pseudobasal clade)

Homo Shamitus (Redlight)

Homo Halmitonius (Blacklight)

Homo Jephesus (Whitelight)

(unranked) Homo Polyplastidophorus (multicellular)

Homo Polyplastidophorus Domesticus (otherwise known as somatic cells)

Their distinct basal feature is the presence of multuple bundles of closely packed, crosslinked Undulipodia, both motile and retractile, called Stereocilia on an otherwise basic Ecliptical cell body. Genuses of Stereociliophorae are normally classified by the position, number and structural designs of the Stereocilia bundles. Some of the important Stereociliophorans includes the largely aquatic Euplotes and the Terrestrial forms of Hypotrichoids. All Stereociliophorans moves by "walking" using their stereocilia bundles on a substrate by actuating their Stereocilia through rhythmic extension and contraction of the Axopodia components and through the bending motion of the Cilia component of each bundle.

The species within the Genus Homo, otherwise known as Humans, Can also produce Flagella and separated Cilia when needing to swim through substrate free, open water environments.

The basal Human cell is characterized by the presence of four Such Stereocilia bundles, or what they called Limbs on their cell body, two of which are used to walk, or rather glide across substrates, one "manipulator arm" that moves and breaks down objects using an array of molecular manipulators and one "printer arm" that extrudes a variety of molecular building blocks from within the cell using Exocytosis to construct, or rather print a variety of objects using multiple different types of materials.

Like all members of the Phylum Ciliophora, Humans possess a Macronucleus and multiple Micronuclei per cell, the Macronucleus processes all the cell's sensory input and is the equivalent of the brain of multicellular organisms. And like other members of Ocuelid bearing protists, they possess a fast but inefficient secondary electromechanical chemical computer near their centrioles that calculates and responds to real time sensory inputs, equivalent of the Cerebellum and visual cortex of vertebrates.

Like other members of the Phylum Ciliophora, Human cells are turing complete, but lack true sentience due to their Cognitary cellular system being entirely based on classic computing-their behavior should best be described as a form of advanced yet code-describable Classical artificial intelligence extremely close to but not a form of true consciousness, which is a quantum phenomenon. The classical nature of the Human Intelligence permits them to replicate themselves indefinitely and produce identical copies of their minds through asexual cell division (binary fission and budding) while maintaining ontological consistency through all their offspring in the sense that a single mind simultaneously experiences, yet can only asynchronously control multiple bodies, and that a cell line will usually act as one individual, except when separated from each other for time long enough that the two separated colonies desync, resulting in two individuals that recognizes themselves as the same, yet clearly separate.

CODEX: Macroscale Bodies currently used by Humanity in different applications.

EVOLVED-A macroscale body of about 1.25 meters across, give or take. These bodies are bipedal, similar to the Microscopic Human cells themselves. "limbs" consists of bundled Axopodia extends from the main body to perform a myriad of tasks, which includes Manipulation, Printing and Locomotion. The lengths of the "limbs" are variable, but the resting state of an EVOLVED, including the (usually four) limbs, is about 1.99 to 2.13 meters in height. the EVOLVED design is used for general purpose motility in complex environments, and for maintenance of most forms of machinery.

WALKER-The equivalent of construction robots of the Human civilization. WALKERs are similarly shaped to the individual Human cells that comprises them, making their appearance similar to that of the EVOLVED, but much smaller at only about 0.45 to 0.6 meters in height. A WALKER always have a manipulator limb and a printer limb for the upper body, but can have a huge variety of different attachments on the lower body for locomotion. These includes human-like legs, wheels, sticky wheels, tracks and their sticky variants, claws for climbing surfaces, multiple legs for navigating complex terrains, sticky legs, adapters for attaching onto other equipment and motorized carriages for moving on tracks. The upper torso of WALKERs are empty on the inside, and can be used to store and transport resources and materials used for construction. WALKERs are unmanned, and are usually pre-programmed or remotely controlled by the operators of their respective project, though a WALKER can be directly controlled by an individual, usually through some form of data link, but also directly by the individual of which it's cells are derived from.

HUNTER-A quadrupedal macroscale body with size varying between 1.89 to 2.6m in length. These bodies are optimized for quick motion on flat surfaces but cal also optimize to leap between separated platforms, like branches of trees. A HUNTER does not have a tail, as their advanced neural networks allows them to balance themselves through only the absolutely necessary degrees of freedom needed for quadrupedal locomotion. HUNTERs are used for quick, long range locomotion of a Human colony/cell line/individual across land.

BRAWLER-A large, heavy duty body that can both walk bipedaly and run quadrupedaly. The front limbs are significantly heavier and stronger, and are usually fitted with specialized, heavy duty tools and/or equipments used for a specific purpose, powered by specially designed molecular motors. A BRAWLER is usually from 4m to 6m in length, and the large amount of biomass required means that they are usually constructed from and controlled by 4 to 6 individuals. BRAWLERs are used for mining, demolition and heavy construction engineering, not unlike the Excavators used by other species in the galaxy.

FLYER-small, unmanned constructs that utilized the principle of Aerodynamics to move across the sky. FLYERS are normally less than 50 centimeters across, and possesses, varying by design, one to multiple pairs of undulating wings powered by a specialized, high power rotary motor. A FLYER can carry up to 15 kilograms by weight, and is usually used to ship Cells, resources samples and other objects that needs to be transported by Air, usually either due to the need for fast transport, or for delivery to destinations that are only reachable by air.

JUGGERNAUGHT-a varient of the BRAWLER design that are significantly larger in size. 8m to 10m in length, JUGGERNAUGHTs uses hydraulics for actuation instead of gliding motion of their internal cells. JUGGERNAUGHTs are exclusively quadrupedal in locomotion, with many different ly shaped attachments on it's front limbs dependent on occupation. JUGGERNAUGHTs are the equivalent of bulldozers used by other species in the galaxy, and are extensively used for open-pit mining, earthmoving, terraforming and demolition. JUGGERNAUGHTs have a crew of 8.

GOLIATH-massive mobile constructs up to a hundred meters by size. weighing multiple kilotons, GOLIATHs serves the role served by ships of other species in the galaxy. The limbs of GOLIATHs are powered by hydraulic pressure produced by an internal osmotic engine that runs on either concentration difference of fresh and salt water or on ATP, producing far higher force than muscles of the same size and mass-the muscular appearance of GOLIATHs are merely an illusion formed by the fluid filled hydraulic bladders that PUSHES rather than PULLS the massive limbs. If the limbs were propelled by biological muscle tissue, the GOLIATHs will beed to have limbs 10 times as thick as they actually had, and would not be able to supply the oxygen needed to operate these muscles even it they did. A GOLIATH does not have a fixed number of upper limbs, though they are all bipedal by their lower bodies. The Limbs of a GOLOATH are highly specialized, and are usually fitted with hydraulically powered equipments that are suited to it's specific occupation. The large bodies of the GOLIATHs are also deceptive-most of the internal volume is cargo space. GOLIATHs are extremely energy efficient for their size and cargo due to their unique power and actuation systems, and are normally used for large scale earthworks and cargo transportation. Due to the sheer size of the GOLIATHs, each one require at minimum of 100 individuals working together to operate at optimal rates, and up to 300 individuals are required to fully maintain and service a GOLIATH.

CODEX: Module Shifting and the Dynamic Reformation-Relocalization system-How to bend your body without muscles

Pioneered and first developed by Wright Brother, the ability of dynamically deflecting a part of a construct without breaking down and reforming the part of the construct were considered an pivotal for the real-time control of and generation of mechanical motion in large-scale constructs, vehicles and spacecrafts. During the 4 years of Aerospace-Macrotechnology RnD, through collaborations of the brightest minds of Humanity of all four species, an universal mechanism of motion were developed and applied to the newest, mobile constructs and machinery of Humanity for real time control and motion in a scale that were never been done or attempted throughout life's history.

Every multicellular construct/macroscopic body constructed using the HAESULTAR-SDD-HMMT protocol is comprised of differentiated yet pluoripotent cells and acellular modules that are connected with each other using a set of antigens that uniquely addresses each and every cell and module to position them at the right place in relation to each other. Although the different modules are in fixed position in relation to each other, the connections between the modules were significantly flexible, in the sense that both the positions of the connections on every single module/cell and the length of said connections are variable to significant degrees by extending/retracting the connecting Axopodia and moving the patches of Stereocilia across the cells' surface.

In order to actuate an actuable element on a construct, the individual linkage lengths and positions of the target state of the component is first calculated using the Finite Element Method, then the resulting information about the positions and lengths of the linkages are transmitted to the cells/modules comprising the actuable element using a variety of communication methods including optical, chemical and electrical communication protocols. The transmitted, Coarse position/length data is then subdivided and interpolated into the position and length information of each individual inter-module linkages by the cells that needs to be actuated themselves using a variety of algorithms. The cells then actuate, move and extend or retract their linking stereocilia and axopodia until the proper lengths and positions are met, aided by the combination of a digital-to-analog converter and an internal molecular ruler. This process uses ATP.

The end result is the bending of the entire element, which either changes the shapes and positions of effector elements for control purposes, or generates mechanical forces and work for physical actuation and motion, allowing the construct to bend and move without the need for either muscles or bones.

The same RnD have also allowed the process known as Module shifting-the change of surface antigens and the gliding motion of individual cells and modules from one point of the construct to another. Further tapping into the computation power of each individual cell, the Aerospace-Macrotechnology research scientists have successfully designed an algorithm that allows each and every cell to independently plot the nearest route ON and IN the construct from it's current position to it's new position upon receiving a new blueprint selected and transmitted by the individual(s) inhabiting and controlling the construct, shifting and moving nearly instantly from the old position to the new position. This allows broken spacecrafts to be patched within seconds, and allows a Human "Individual" to form, deconstruct, change and shift it's macroscopic body from one design to another within tens of seconds.

CODEX: The technology and Genetics of Homo spp.

Being a type of Ciliate, the Macronuclear genome and the operating memory of Homo spp. Understood as Humans are but the two names of the same thing-the information stored, often in multiple redundancy through polyploidy and aneuploidy within the macronucleus of every Human cell, and constantly edited as part of the computation process that comprised the Human's mind. It's therefore understandable, that, the genome of an entire population of Humans can be updated remotely and almost instantly as soon as a new technology upgrade is developed and disclosed on the various information networks used by the specific Human population.

Due to this ability of editing their genome on-the-fly, a Human colony that needed help or a Human fleet in the middle of a battle can receive and adopt a needed technological upgrade or a adaptive specialization change within minutes, and are known to emerge victorious from scenarios that were initially very disadvantageous, even outright lethal to them.

****1966 A.D. ******"******As a matter of fact, I have!"****

It was a normal day of the year, sun was shining, waves were rolling, leaves of Archaeplastida waves in the wind in south florida... and the first attempted orbital Spacecraft were on the launchpad of the Kentucky Space Center.

The spacecraft, Atlas-Agena, was an improvement upon the more primitive designs first developed by the Atlantean Wright Brother, consists of a Hydrogen peroxide-Hydroquinone fueled Atlas lower stage with a newer upper Agena stage of Atlantean design, utilizing some of the newest product of Macroscale technology-Liquid oxygen with a fuel of five parts acetone and one part water for propulsion. This spacecraft, alone with it's single crew, a Whitelight individual named Uri gargarin, were set to be the first attempt at orbital spaceflight. The spacecraft uses an Atlantean-developed long range pulsed laser for communication with the ground, both as a mean to transmit scientific data down to the ground, and to (hopefully) recover Uri gargarin's Macronuclear genome through wireless transmission in the event of a Rapid Unplanned Disassembly of the Spacecraft.

A light signal is sent to the spacecraft silently through a flash of light, and the valves holding back the pressurized hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone-peroxidase mixture were opened. The two volatile fluids rushed into a combustion chamber made of pure carbon and reacted, producing a hot jet of flame almost 1800K in temperature which leaves the combustion chamber at 1650 meters per second. The Atlas lower stage lifted off the launchpad with a plume of steam and combustion products, it's orientation carefully controlled through a combination of gimbaling the combustion chamber-nozzle assembly and actuating a set of fins on the lower end of the stage.

The Spacecraft quickly and unknowingly broke through the sound barrier, and accelerated faster and faster as the dense lower atmosphere is being left behind.

The Atlas first stage burned out and separated from the Agena as the spacecraft reached a speed of nearly 3120 meters per second, and the Agena's engine ignited. A marvel of Atlantean macroengineering, the Agena's engine uses the decomposition of Hydrogen peroxide to drive a turbine, which powers the pumps that injected the acetone-water Fuel and Liquid oxygen oxidizer into a combustion chamber made of carbon nanotube reinforced silica at pressures of nearly 50 atmospheres. The violent reaction of the chemicals created a flame of nearly 4200K in temperature and expelled combustion products at a whooping 2250 meters per second, Accelerating the Agena further and further.

Uri gargarin shut down the Agena's engine as the velocity of the spacecraft reached 7600 meters per second according to ground based measurement, putting the spacecraft into a slightly ecliptical orbit around the earth.

At this altitude, the spacecraft orbits the earth once every 90 minutes, which means that the sun rises and sets once every 90 minutes. Uri gargarin could see the stars from the Agena even alongside with the sun, as there were no atmosphere to scatter the sunlight and blot out the stars in orbit. gargarin could see Mercury whizzing around the sun, the corona of the sun emanating from the disk itself, and the red prominences of the chromosphere on the edge of the sun, all without needing the moon to block out the sunlight as in a Total solar Eclipse.

Gargarin attempted to increase the speed of the spacecraft by firing it's engine at the Retrograde direction of the spacecraft, but the spacecraft instead entered a higher orbit, and, paradoxically, decreased it's speed in relative to the earth. Humanity have, in the first time outside of calculation, experienced the effects of Orbital Mechanics, as Uri gargarin experimented with changing the Agena's velocity in different directions, and the mechanisms of orbital motion pulled the spacecraft in a paradoxical yet entirely calculable manner.

After about 20 circles around the earth, Uri gargarin deorbited the spacecraft using it's engines. As the spacecraft descends, Uri gargarin noticed that the temperature around the spacecraft starts to increase rapidly, as the atmosphere compresses in front of the spacecraft and heats up. The front of the Agena soon started to burn away, carrying heat away with it. As the Agena slowed down, the temperature around gargarin decreased until the temperature is once again the same as the normal temperature of high-altitude air. Gargarin deployed the parachute of the Agena, and the spacecraft descended smoothly toward the ground right next to the KSC.

Uri gargarin left the Agena's remains, morphed into HUNTER form, then ran rapidly towards the KSC, carrying some of the charred hull with it.

In the KSC:

Uri gargarin uploaded it's discovery to the Space Program's information network, and handed the ablated hull remains to Werhner Von Braun. Using these discoveries, the Space Program quickly derived the equations of orbital mechanics and maneuvering, and a new set of material: Ablative material, have started to be developed.

As the many press reporters of North America swarmed toward the KSC in their proprietary "Fast deployment" forms to ask the director of the Space program whether they have fully completed all the mission goals in their first Human Orbital Spaceflight, Gargarin replied:"As a matter of hact, I have!"

CODEX: The Macronuclear genome and the Fungibility of the Human mind

For most types of sentient lifeforms and the Milky Way forms of A.I., the mind itself can neither be fully decoded and archived, duplicated nor moved from one computational substrate to another due to the quantum nature of True consciousness.

However, as a form of Computation-based semi-general artificial intelligence based on the quasi-deterministic, yet fully classical computation performed through molecular gene-editing (a subclass of Nondeterministic classical turing machine) within the macronucleus of a ciliate, the Mind of a Human is simply the specific information stored within the memory of the Macronuclear computer of the cell(s)-their Macronuclear genome. Therefore, the Mind of a Human is just like any other piece of data that can be Copied, Pasted, Duplicated and Moved across multiple different substrates. This Fungibility is vastly similar to, yet different from the Sentient networked virtual intelligence known as the Geth, in the sense that an individual mind can be transmitted and moved across different substrates. However, unlike a Geth program which can not be duplicated in any way without reducing the semi-quantum program code and mental constructs into a pile of self-conflicting, paradoxical code and lifeless data files, a Human mind is fully classical, and can therefore be fully decoded and duplicated without loss of ontological continuity nor function. In fact, the Mind of a Human individual naturally splits and duplicates itself into two or multiple daughter cells whenever a cell divides asexually, resulting in a group of cells, or a Cell Line, that is both physically and computationally separate, yet recognized themselves as and operated as the same individual. (think multithreading in most modern programming languages-computation spread out on multiple cores, yet the process remain logically a single runtime.) The mind or Macronuclear genome of a Human individual can be recovered from otherwise dead cell matter and revived, but the technology for doing so is still in development.

(Note: I want Shepard to be properly brought back from death during the start of ME2 as still the same individual, and not as what's essentially a separate consciousness/A.I. who think he/she is shepard as the original games suggests. Hence the Fungible, Duplicable, Classical mental structure for the Human-Protists)

****1970 A.D. ******"******One minute step for a (even more minute) Cell, but a (moderately large) leap for Cellkind******"**

It have been just over five years since the first Rocket have been designed, tested and launched during the time of Von Braun and Wright brother, and the space race were in it's all-time high. Other nations have also been experimenting with their own forms of spaceflight, and the other Superpower-the aptly called United Siberian Systems of Eurasia, or USSE, have announced the launches of their first commercial Automaton Orbital Hardware-the First unmanned commercial satellites. These satellites, dubbed "SovietLink", relays the various communication lasers of the globe in a fast, few-intermediate Low-latency manner, fundamentally changing the concept of Networking across the Globe.

At the KSC, as the USSE announced that they will send their first Manned spacecraft to the Moon, the team of Politicians, scientists and engineers were in a frenzy-they HAVE to beat the USSK in time. Even though North america was the first continent to achieve Orbital spaceflight, it's the USSK who achieved the First Docking of two spacecrafts in orbit, and launched the First Commercially important orbital satellites-much of North American ISPs have already booked bandwidth of the SovietLink to reduce latency and increase speed of their service.

"We must land on the moon before the Eurasians do, or we may lose our influence on the globe."

"We must not fall behind the Eurasians"

Von Braun discussed on the KSC intranet with the team of scientists and engineers, Consensus had soon been reached, and the blueprint of a new rocket Saturn was drawn.

The USSE have announced their design-The N1-Soyuz rocket, using Liquid Oxygen to burn a fuel of Triglycerides, their rocket engines could achieve exhaust velocities of 3150m/s at sea level to 3550m/s in vacuum. Most of their designs have been validated on the test stands and flown on (highly successful) commercial rockets... but for such a large rocket, nothing is to be sure.

One year later.

The Saturn stands motionless on the Launchpad of the KSC, while the N1-Soyuz is carefully lifted to it's upright position on the USSE's Kazakhstan launch facility.

The Saturn is a three stage design, the Lower stage uses the same mixture of Triglycerides and Liquid Oxygen as the Eurasians uses, and the two Upper stages runs on a new fuel-Liquid Hydrogen. Another Atlantean achievement of engineering, the abundant supplies of Helium in North America were utilized to condense molecular hydrogen into a liquid using the Stirling cycle, providing an equally abundant supply of the most energetic mixture of fuel and oxidizer known to Man.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

The first Saturn and the first N1-Soyuz were both test launches: they were used to validate the designs of the rockets, and to see whether the rockets could inject a dummy payload to a trajectory toward the moon. Telescopes were pointing at the moon to see the Impact of the dummy payloads, and the color and sequence of the resulting flash(es) will declare to the entire globe the winner of the first step towards the first Man(cell?) on the moon.

"We have Ignition and Liftoff of the..."

Flames shoots out of the Five enormous engine bells of the Saturn's first stage, the Water that were put under the launchpad for protection turns into a billowing cloud of vapour, and the Saturn accelerated off the launchpad leaving a sooty trail of exhaust.

The Deserts of Kazakhstan were lit by the light of a thousand suns as the N1-Soyuz cleared the launch tower, the 38 NK-33 engines produced an incandescent plume of burning hydrocarbons as the fuel-rich exhaust reacted with the oxygen in the air.

"We have reached Max-Q and climbing..."

A Plume of condensation suddenly encircles the Saturn as it broke through the sound barrier, the exhaust plume starts to expand, and the brilliant glow of the rocket plume have died down. 400m/s, 500m/s, 600m/s...

Inside the NK-33's combustion chambers, the polyunsaturated fatty acids in the fuel that were meant to lower the melting point of the fuel have reacted with the Oxygen from the violent combustion reaction, the methylene group between two adjacent double bonds easily donates a hydrogen atom to molecular oxygen to form a radical, which reacted with another oxygen molecule to form a superoxide, which rips off another hydrogen atom from a methylene group to form a hydroperoxide, that reacted with other methylene groups to generate another free radical, ..., Once initiated, this chain reaction of Lipid peroxidation propagates and amplifies like the nuclear chain reaction inside an atomic bomb, producing more and more free radicals that then recombines to form cross-links between the different fatty acid sidechains of the triglyceride fuel. As the NK-33s have to work for an extended amount of time, the rapidly growing polymerization reaction had time to produce enough solid polymers to completely clog up many of the microscopic nozzles of the fuel injectors. The pressure behind the injector backs up rapidly, as does the pressure inside the exit tubing and the housing of the turbopumps that fed the fuel to the combustion chambers. This pressure continues to increase as more and more of the fuel injector's nozzles were clogged up by the polymer, until the turbopump housings could no longer withstand the extreme pressure, and the entire turbopump assembly explodes into thousands of fragments moving at supersonic velocities. The fragments struck other NK-33 engines, causing them to also fail and explode, spilling the fuel and oxidizer and igniting them in an uncontrolled manner. The N-1 rocket Explodes into a massive fireball with a yield of more than 6000 tons of TNT in the clear night sky above the Kazakhstan's deserts, the Launch Escape System pulled the Dummy Soyuz payload clear of the Expanding fireball, which, Ironically, landed intact. The USSE's dream of beating the North Americans on the first moon landing have been met with a setback... at least for this stage of the competition.

"We have Burnout and separation of the first stage of Saturn..."

The Saturn used a triglyceride formulation that contains Short chain Saturated fatty acids to lower the melting point of the fuel instead of the Polyunsaturated fatty acids used by the USSE. This formulation is slightly less energetic, but it had the advantage of not being susceptible toward lipid peroxidation and polymerization, and therefore it did not clog up the (much bigger) injector nozzles of the Saturn's F-1 engines. The first stage reached Burnout uneventfully, and the clamps that held the stages together released the upper stages from the now empty and useless first stage.

The second stage's five J-2 engines fired, this time with practically no visible plume as the H2+O2 reaction is exceptionally poor at light production. With an Exhaust Velocity of more than 4235 meters per second, the relative light second and third stage of Saturn does not require the first stage to burn for an extended amount of time, further reducing the risk of an explosion.

"We have Achieved Orbit"

As the second stage silently cut off it's engines, a silent cheer rippled across the KSC intranet, and the mission control now plotted a maneuver point to send the third stage and the dummy payload toward the moon, one orbit later.

"Initiating burn for translunar injection"

The single J-2 Engine of the Saturn's third stage ignited. People on the night side of the earth could see a faint, quickly moving new star on the night sky as the solidified exhaust reflected sunlight. The Third stage along with the Dummy payload entered translunar trajectory as the J-2 engine of the Saturn's third stage cuts off.

"The KSC's first test launch of a Rocket that can reach the moon were deemed Successful"

News starts to circulate on the different information networks of the different Nations of Humanity, including that of the USSE. Now have known the reason of the first N1-Soyuz launch failure, The USSE have drilled out the holes on the NK-33s' Fuel injectors, switched the polyunsaturated fatty acid fuel for a composition of Saturated fatty acids, using a heater in the N1's fuel tanks to keep the fuel liquid. They still does not know about North America's secret of using short chain fatty acids in their triglyceride fuel to lower the melting point and prevent lipid peroxidation.

3 months later:

The new lunar-orbit-landing-return-capable spacecraft, Apollo, sat snugly on the top of the Saturn, on the KSC's launchpad. They will have to beat the USSE to be the first one to send a Human being(Cell) around the moon, and to test out the design of the Apollo for the real Moon landing attempt. However, things were not ideal for this time.

In the earlier successful, manned orbital spacecrafts, in order to generate the ATP that every one of their Cell(s) needs to stay alive and operate, the crew brought special cells and a mixture of sugars and chemicals to perform Anaerobic respiration. This worked great for short-term flight, but the inefficiency of anaerobic respiration means that the available payload capacity of the launch systems and the available mass fraction for the crew's supplies could carry only enough sugars and chemicals to last for a maximum of two days. Enough for most LEO missions, but not even close for any missions that goes beyond that- a Transfer to the moon alone would require at least three days and a half, and a full lunar return mission would last for at least 1 to 2 days over a week. This renders Anaerobic respiration impractical-The Sugars and Chemicals required would have been too heavy for the Saturn to launch, and for the Apollo to carry.

So the Apollo I used a different approach- instead of Anaerobic respiration using only sugars as the energy source, the systems of Apollo I saturates the spaces that will by occupied by the Crew's Cells with pure oxygen of a low pressure. This enables the crew to use Aerobic respiration for ATP production, which dramatically reduces the weight of the supplies that is needed to perform a one-week-and-one-to-two-days mission, making it possible for the Saturn to launch the entire spacecraft, the crew and all the supplies at once.

Unfortunately, as the crew will find out, Pure Oxygen is also Highly reactive in a variety of oxidation reactions-like a fire.

The first test conducted was the test for the Fuel cells that will be used by the craft to provide power. In order to form an electrical generator, Humanity uses a stack of membraneous sacs, each with a set of respiratory machinery in the Lumen of the sacs and the Electron Transfer Chain on one side of the sacs, the other side dotted with proton and ion channels. Cellular respiration generates a electrochemical proton motive force, which gets linked head-to-tail with one another in a stack not unlike that of a Voltaic pile-one sac generates about 0.3V, and a stack of one hundred sacs in a stack generates about 30V, one thousand sacs generates 300V and so on. The first crew of three enters the Apollo 1 capsule, differentiating their modules and shifting their cells to the specific design required by the Spacecraft's blueprints. Electrical systems sprang to life, data starts to be generated from the navigation systems, and Oxygen was released into the Apollo 1 capsule from a set of canisters filled with liquid oxygen.

Everything seems to be OK, until one of the crew members detected an overtemperature in the fuel cells-the lipids that made up the membranes have started to oxidize in the pure oxygen environment. The temperature climbs higher and higher, until one of the capsule's internal visual sensors have detected a brilliant jet of flame.

"Fire!" The crew shouted to Ground control through the telemetry channel. "Open The Hatch!" The two EVOLVED overseeing the test attempts to open the hatch of the capsule, but fails as the internal pressure reached above two atmospheres, pressing the hatch firmly against it's frame. They watched in horror as the blazing flames consumes everything inside the capsule, a brilliant white flash of light shines through the small transparent window in the hatch, before nothing except black smoke can be seen on the inside of the capsule.

The ground crew managed to pry open the hatch of the Apollo 1 capsule with the aid of a near by Manipulator arm on the tower that were used to stack rocket stages and spacecraft parts together, only after almost 3 minutes from the initial flash as the temperature and pressure dropped below one atmosphere.

Inside the capsule, they were met with nothing but ashes from the intense fire, charred remains of biomass and melted metals from the inorganic components of the Apollo I spacecraft. The original test crew of 3 were completely incinerated, with no trace of cells or material identifiable as from the original crew left in the remains.

The news of a Fire and loss of crew in the Apollo 1 ground tests shocked the entire North America-until the KSC have revealed that the Test crew have divided out half of their biomass as a back up prior to boarding the Apollo for the test-nothing were lost except some traumatic memories that would presumably be experienced as the partition that performed the test were completely incinerated alive without a trace.

In the USSE:

The second Soyuz launch was a success-with far bigger, clogging-resistant injector nozzles for the NK-33 long burning stages and no polymerizable polyunsaturated fatty acids that can oxidize, dry up and clog said nozzles, the second N1-Soyuz launch attempt was successful, sending one Whitelight individual, Boris Yucatan around the moon once and landing back on earth successfully. The spacecraft fails to ignite it's Block 4 circularizing engine again at it's periapsis on far side of moon because the Saturated fatty acid fuel were solidified at the time of arrival, but the free return trajectory meant that the Soyuz were still able to return to the earth and land in the tundras of Russia-Exactly as planned by the USSE in case of an engine failure and abort on the lunar transfer trajectory. Boris have also brought back image data from the far side of the moon during His fly-by around it. Pictures that were soon disseminated in news across the world thanks to their SovietLink global satellite network.

The KSC have learned from it's past mistakes, and have now added Helium gas into their mix for the Apollo's internal atmosphere. Preliminary testing suggest the 91% helium, 4% CFC and 5% O2 mix should be able to support respiration by the Atlanteans and the Blacklight, yet completely unable to sustain a flame of any kind... or if they so wish.

Chief designer Nicolas Minkrovski was Banging its (imaginary) head on to the ground, contrary to the cheers of the general public of a "success" of the second N1-Soyuz mission. As the report from the recent N1-Soyuz mission, which Minkrovski was currently reading from the USKP(United Siberian Kosmic Program)'s own intranet, suggests that the Saturated fatty acid fuel mixture solidified during lunar transit despite the Heaters which should be keeping it warm. The thermometer readings were normal, as much as It(he?) can tell, though the heat evidently did not spread uniformly throughout the fuel tank. The USSE won't be figuring out the fact that convection does not work in microgravity within the next two years. Now on, they will resort to the slightly more water/base-sensitive Methyl Pentyl Ketone for upper stage propellant now on. And also, don't forget to include the Acetic acid as the anti-polymerization stabilizer-Polymerized fuel is just as bad as the Frozen stuff that were encountered in the Block 4-Block 5 upper stage of the previous mission.

CODEX: Membrane polymerization and filtration of Lipophilic/Amphiphilic organic molecules through a biological membrane.

In order to refine the High Energy Density liquid fuels needed for the various Space programs of Humanity, not only a complex Anabolic process have to take place through the use of tailored enzymes, but a special filter that is impermeable toward free diffusion of the lipophilic end products is also required for the separation and storage of the end product from the biosynthetic machinery. In order to achieve this, special membranes, known as Structural Polymeric Membranes, or SPM, were developed.

SPMs were partially based on the design of Bacterial Intracellular MicroComparments, or BMCs, in the sense that the membrane Itself have significant mechanical strength against a significant pressure difference across it.

These membranes were made of proteins bound together into a nearly rigid, monolayer tiling by esterification with long chain fatty dicarboxylic acids-fatty acids with a carboxyl group at each end. The Rigid outer shell prevents the permeation of random lipophilic/amphiphilic molecules by acting as a semi-solid, while specialized channels and transporters were fitted onto specific proteins that were docked to the membrane, allowing the diffusion/active transport of specific product molecules across it.

The basic form uses Reverse Osmosis-a membrane fitted with selective channels is subjected to a very high pressure difference from the production side fluid to the Storage side fluid, as the pressure difference exceeds the Osmotic pressure from the imbalance of solutes between the sides (Only lipophilic/amphiphilic molecules can cross a lipid bilayer membrane if the membrane was not fitted with special water channels called Aquaporins), the mildly lipophilic, membrane-crossable product molecules are forced through the membrane to the product storage side, while the highly polar/charged components and intermediates of the production side liquid can not cross the membrane, and therefore left behind.

This process is used in the production of alcohols, ketones, fatty acid esters and other lipophilic fuel molecules with low purity requirements.

The more Advanced forms involves special transporters-as the molecules can cross a traditional lipid bilayer membrane, a protein based membrane was used. Structural proteins forms a solid barrier that is resistant to permeation of all types of molecules, including gases, and special transporter proteins are fitted over some parts of the membrane-they uses the energy from ATP hydrolysis to actively force the product molecule through carefully placed holes in the membrane. This process is used for the production of lipophilic/amphiphilic molecules for applications where high Purity is needed.

Another 3 months later:

Apollo 2 was now on the KSC launchpad. Apollo 2 will be Humanity's first attempt at a moon landing, with a reduced crew of just 2, the spacecraft uses an atmosphere that resists combustion to permeate the biological components and supplies Oxygen for Aerobic respiration, dramatically decreases the chance of a fire.

"five, four, three, two, one"

N1-Soyuz Phase 2 was fully fueled on the Kazakhstan launch facility, using a new blend of fuel that will not solidify during extended transits, Minkrovski was confident that this mission will surely be Humanity's first landing on the moon, beating the KSP(Kentucky Space Program) on the last second.

Both rockets lifted off the launchpad Simultaneously, both launches were successful. It's now only a matter of time(and luck?) until the first Man(Cell?) on the moon will be a reality.

The Translunar injections executed smoothly, and the Apollo and the Soyuz are heading towards the moon, side by side.

2 days into the mission:

"Initiating Cryo stir on the #3 liquid oxygen tank"

O'neil Armstrong connected the power to the stirring motor inside Liquid Oxygen tank #3, as scheduled by Mission Control in the KSC. The liquid oxygen inside these tanks needed to be occasionally stirred, in order to maintain good thermal contact with the tank's walls, and, by extension, the spacecraft's heat management system. This ensures that the Liquid oxygen inside the tanks are kept at a constant temperature, maintaining a constant flow of oxygen from evaporation.

The service bay was pressurized with HeptafluoroBromoPentane, one of the most potent fire suppressors known by Man. The KSC was confident that such treatment would make sure that the same Incident that happened on Apollo 1 will not happen again. However, one of the things they overlooked, is the fact that, the wiring to the stirring motor and the Liquid Oxygen tanks themselves were made of Aluminum.

CODEX: (13²⁷Al) Aluminum/Aluminium

Aluminum, or Aluminium, Atomic number 13, mass number 27, symbol Al, was the second best electrical conductor on earth by mass, just below that of silver. Aluminum was first discovered during the Atlantean war, as a result of an ever increasing arms race of better lasers and more reflective hull plating between the Land based Humans and the Atlanteans. Polished Aluminum reflects light extremely efficiently, and the melting point of Aluminum was significantly higher than the decomposition point of most polymers that were available during the war. In modern days, Aluminum is prepared by the electrolysis of it's Oxide, Alumina, dissolved in a bath of Sodium HexafluoroAluminate (Sodium HexaFluoridoAluminate(III)), or Cryolite. The electrodes are made of graphite, a product made from Pyrolyzed Organic waste or Superheated coal. Advanced forms of the same Voltaic cells that were used to power the heaters of the Haber-Bosch reactors are used to produce a constant current at around 3.35 Volts per cell, the cells themselves being connected in series in order to minimize loss of electrical power to Hydrogen and Oxygen/Chlorine byproducts. The resulting Aluminum is a molten liquid, and is normally formed into the desired shape using Injection molding with a Graphite/Carbonized thermoset polymer Die. Very thin films of aluminum is usually deposited on to a variety of surfaces, including very thin sheets of delicate polymers and even on the membranes on the outside or inside of cells by evaporation in a vacuum. Aluminum is usually used in supplement to more traditional Biopolymer based materials in a wide variety of applications, primarily for making products that are optically reflective or electrically conductive, including electrical wires, mirrors and multilayer insulation found in many industrial/aerospace applications.

As Aluminum is very strong when cold, and is largely non-flammable when handled in Bulk form. It is therefore a very attractive material for making Oxidizer tanks and/or reactors/burners that operates in the temperature range of 510K to 700K.

Let's look at the week before the Launch of Apollo 2, and see what happened to Liquid Oxygen tank #3.

"Are you sure these Mercury/Gemini surplus Lox tanks are safe for use on the Apollo without retrofitting?"

"Not sure. I do know that one of the Gemini capsules that went... quite dramatically on the launchpad. But it was due to the Polyurethane based insulation we used to coat electrical wires with. I think that retrofitting them with PTFE coated wires should solve the problem."

"let's do it."

The Other three tanks that will be used in the Apollo are refitted with PTFE wrapped wires and motors. However, the Stirring motor for liquid oxygen tank #4 was neglected for some reason, and the motor that was actually flown inside Apollo 2 was the original Polyurethane-wrapped version, and the engineering department have also failed to notice that the fact that the magnets for the stator were nearly demagnetized from extended storage near a (very noisy) rocket launch site.

As O'neil Armstrong connected the electrical circuit that supplied 30 volts to the Stirring motor in Liquid Oxygen tank #3, the nearly demagnetized magnet did not provide enough torque nor back EMF to keep the current through the windings low. As the result, the Windings overheated, and the polyurethane insulation caught fire in the liquid oxygen. If the windings were made of copper, or the outside wire were not coated in Polytetrafluoroethelene, the small flame would have quickly burned itself out.

However, as the Windings were made of aluminum, the heat from the burning polyurethane insulation heated up the aluminum to a temperature of approximately 1250K, which causes the aluminum atoms to become active enough to strip the fluorine atoms out of the PTFE insulation just behind it. If there were no fluorine atoms around, the aluminum would have formed a thick layer of the refractive solid aluminum oxide, preventing any further reactions from taking place. However, the compound of Aluminum and Fluorine, aluminum fluoride, is a volatile liquid that evaporates easily. As the result, the reaction can continue unabated. A Thermite reaction started, the reaction between the aluminum wiring and the PTFE insulation/lining of the tank produced temperatures exceeding 2423 K, which melted through the walls of the tank, causing the pressurized container to explode. The superheated fragments of aluminum reacted with the HeptafluoroBromopropane in the service bay, producing even more heat and pressure. The Apollo Service Module exploded, ripping off an entire side panel, and causes the other three Liquid Oxygen tanks to rapidly vent out their content of liquid oxygen.

O'neil Armstrong felt a loud "BOOM" from the command module, Onboard Accelerometer registered a sudden jolt of acceleration, and the service module sensors returned the data of a rapid depletion of the CSM's liquid oxygen supply.

Liquid oxygen is needed to run the Fuel cells that provided the Apollo with onboard power, with this source of power gone, the entire mission would have to be scrubbed. The crew retreated to the lunar module, and turned off most of the electronics within the Command module. Luckily, they are in a free return trajectory, and therefore should return to the earth, if their trajectory is not altered significantly by the explosion. The other crew constructed a Respiration Pile from it's cells, and proceeds to use it to provide the small amount of power that was needed to keep the Lunar Module's control and tracking systems running using the (grossly over-marginalized) oxygen reserves from the Command module's now unpowered and useless Life Support system. They are safe, fore now.

Lunar Periapsis, Soyuz:

Veteran Cosmonaut Uri Golbachev fired the Block 4's engines again. This time, the fuel didn't solidify, and the Soyuz is smoothly and uneventfully injected into a circular orbit around the moon.

However, as It proceeds to the Lunar module, and attempted to fire the block 5 to descend to the moon, it did not respond.

Let's see what happened to the block 5 5 days ago.

Engineer Veru Werbarkoski was having a bad day.

In order to catch pace with the KSP, the USKP was pushing it's limit in it's ability of construction. In order to maximize the speed of production, the USKP ordered it's engineers to control multiple WALKER bodies in order to speed up construction, and to print out any parts of the spacecraft that can be printed on the site, on the site. Even the scientists, which was normally calculating parameters or performing simulations connected to each other forming what's known as a "Computation Complex", were ordered to disconnect and aid in construction work. Of course, because many of the scientists does not actually know how to construct the technology they came up in theory, and because many of the scientists are not familiar with controlling Macroscale bodies for construction work, their aid in the construction works can be best described as... Sloppy.

Of course, such hastily construction always resulting in errors and flaws. A lot of them.

Veru Werbarkoski have not rested for three days. He is neither in the occupation of nor have been trained as a controller for construction WALKERs, and the continued mental and physical work of doing something he is not good at have caused severe mental exhaustion in the form of days of unsorted memory fragments and uncleared junk data-the memory fragments and junk data have started to put a strain on his processing power, and his control of the WALKERs have begun to glitch and lag. One WALKER suddenly lost grip to it's current foothold and fell down to a vat of Methyl Pentyl ketone. The WALKER quickly regained control, and lifted itself out of the vat with one of it's arms.

However, if you look very closely down to the vat of Methyl Pentyl Ketone, something have already fell off the WALKER and have dissolved into the vat of Methyl Pentyl Ketone.

That Something were spores of methanogenic Archaea. Methanosarcina Acetovorans, the very same microbe that triggered the Permian mass extinction are now everywhere and still everywhere, making bubbles of methane gas whereever there were decaying organic matter or any form of substrate they could utilize.

The vat of Methyl Pentyl Ketone was intended for the Block 5 of the third N1-Soyuz flight.

Acetic acid was mixed into the Methyl Pentyl Ketone before it was loaded into the Block 5 fuel tank of the N1-Soyuz vehicle. Inside the fuel tank, the Methanosarcina spores germinated, and starts to ferment the Acetic acid into less acidic Carbon Dioxide and Methane gas, slowly lowering the acidity of the Fuel.

The Rocket launched the day after. One third of the Acetic acid have been consumed.

Two days later, another one half of the Acetic acid have been consumed.

At the time of Lunar orbit injection, All of the Acetic acid have been consumed, and the Methyl Pentyl Ketone have started to polymerize.

When Uri Golbachev attempted to light the Block 5's engines to descend to the moon, the Methyl Pentyl Ketone have completely turned into a piece of glassy, polymerized solid.

"Oh, Crap."

Uri Golbachev sent an error message to USKP mission control, and entered Hibernation mode.

CODEX: Cryptobiosis

Cryptobiosis is a common phenomenon found in all domains of life. Living cells, when subjected to unfavorable conditions for growth, forms structures that can lay dormant and metabolically inactive for a very long time, resuming metabolism and growth only when favorable conditions are met again. Bacteria and Archaea forms Endospores, inert structures that can last for thousands of years, yet still germinate into viable cells once the right condition was met. Yeast and fungi also makes spores, which can last for hundreds of years and be still viable. Plant seeds can last thousands of years, and Protozoa can also Encyst, or coat themselves in a sturdy shell of extracellular matrix, and when encysted, a prozoan can stay viable inside salt crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. Many forms of Archaeplastida plants, including the genus Hematococcus, starts to encyst and turns red by synthesizing a large amount of carotenoids, which can then proceed to survive in a dehydrated form for at least one hundrad and fifteen thousand years-115 thousand-years old salt crystals from Death Valley have yielded viable Hematococcus when dissolved in water and subjected to the proper conditions for growth.

Being a type of Protist, Humans can also Enter Cryptobiosis-"Hibernation Mode" when the surrounding environment is unsuitable for survival/growth. They does so by first triple-duplicating their Macronuclear and Micronuclear genome, and then dissociate into individual cells, which promptly encysts. The individual cells synthesizes the sugar Trehalose, which replaces the water inside the cells and solidifies into a glassy structure, preserving all the genetic material and cellular machinery in a highly stable, radiation resistant solid matrix. The outer shell of the encysted cells were constructed from calcium Poly (1,3 (fructose phosphate) phosphate) and a large amount of lycopene, a carotenoid. This shell, when rehydrated and when the Glycolytic enzymes (known as "sentinel enzymes") within the cell met the right condition for activation, becomes a direct source of carbon and energy, which helps the cells resume their metabolic activity. The Triple backup and automatic self-repair of their genomes ensures that all the Memories and the constituents of the Human Mind is kept intact whenever a viable cell wakes up from Cryptobiosis, and the Individual encystment of cells allows the individual to regenerate from any part of the biomass that have been left from the start of It's hibernation, regardless of cell number or cell type.

O'neil Armstrong splashed down in the pacific with Apollo 2, which were promptly rescued by a nearby cruising GOLIATH. The USSE scrambles for a rescue mission, and the KSP started construction of the third Saturn-Apollo spacecraft.

Six months later:

Apollo 3, the newest, debugged Moon rocket of the Kentucky Space Program, Launched with the hope of the first True moon landing of Mankind.

No clogged injector nozzles to cause a catastrophic explosion, No Oxygen fueled fire to incinerate the crew alive, No expired surplus Liquid Oxygen tanks to explode during a Cryo Stir, No saturated fatty acids to freeze the Service Module fuel into a solid, No polymerizing fuel to stop the descent engine from firing, the Apollo 3 injected into an orbit around the moon, the LM detaches and burned gracefully to a landing on the near side of the moon.

"Opening LM exterior hatch"

"I am descending on the ladder"

"the texture... It resembles volcanic ash."

"This is A microscopic step for a Cell, But a not so microscopic leap for Cellkind."

O'neil Armstrong and It's Partner Jebediah Wright, wearing EVOLVED bodies, stepped down the LM ladder onto the fluffy regolith of the moon.

Some experiments were deployed from their compartments in the Lunar Module, some, like a retroreflective mirror, were printed using Lunar material onto a large Boulder.

"What about THAT?"

"Which 'THAT'?"

Jebediah Wright opened a compartment and reveals a large can of what resembles spray paint.

"To show that We KSP were the first to land on the moon!"

O'neil Armstrong took the can of paint from Jabedian Wright, and started to jump in the low gravity of the moon, spraying the shiny particles on the ground below Him, the reduced gravity, merely 1.66 meters per second square, meant that Armstrong could reach sixty to eighty meters each jump. The Glistening particles settled on the surface of the moon, and the ground below him started to take on an orange tint.

The can looked small, but it proved exceptionally durable for it's size.

After emptying an entire can onto the surface of the moon, the entire square kilometer or so have completely turned orange.

Jebediah Wright took out a second can of paint, this time it produces a blue color when sprayed.

Instead of spraying the paint in a perfect square as O'neil Armstrong did, Jebediah instead hopped farther and farther away from the Lunar module, graffitiing the word "JEB WAS HERE" onto an area of lunar surface measuring 20x5 kilometers in dark blue.

"What's this thing called?"

"Nanoreflective Coating technology. It was made of enormous sheets of aluminum coated graphene, each only two atoms thick, held apart using microscopic foam spheres the same size of a specific wavelength of light. Light bounces off the two layers of aluminized graphene , wavelengths four times the space between the sheets cancels out, other wavelengths gets reflected. It's the most covering paint by mass we have developed."

"perfect for telling the world that we are the first to land on the moon!"

The second after their painting of the moon, Everyone on Earth knows that: Jebediah was on the moon.


	3. Chapter 3

**CHAPTER 3: First Contact**

(thanks for your comments!)

(i will be writing the rest of the history to First contact, and something technical about AIs, Enjoy!)

**1973 A.D.**

The first permanent space station, Mir/H was launched by the USSE, using their newest invention-the UR-700 Super Heavy Lifter rocket. The USSE managed to land their own Cells on the moon, too-Kosnov Chichibabinski, one of the Redlight, landed on the moon using the first launch of the UR-700 Super Heavy Lifter, and promptly sprayed an EVEN BIGGER line of words "USKP HEAVIEST LANDING ON THE MOON" on the moon's surface.

The face of the moon have started to look like a piece of gigantic canvas with more and more child's drawing and graffiti covering it as time goes by... As the two major space powers started a heated competition for land claim and resources claim on the moon.

However, both the KSP and the USKP have admitted that they still does not have the technology nor ability to actually mine and utilize the resources they claimed...Yet.

**1975 A.D. The Convert-O-Tron ISRU resource extraction and conversion Suite**

The KSP were not sitting there doing nothing, either. The Saturn have been adopted to launch a series of self contained space laboratories, known as "Skylab"s, to different orbits around the earth, as a mean to conduct experiments and study the effects of Zero G. Rumor says that The KSP have started the first screening trials of propulsion that will no longer require reaction mass, hence freeing spaceflight from the tyranny of the rocket equation.

Nomatter what the rumors said, the first product of Zero-G technology research and development was actually something called the Convert-O-Tron ISRU resource extraction and conversion Suite. It promises the ability to finally utilize space resources for the space program itself, freeing the space industry from the constraints of the Payload capacity of earth based launch systems.

CODEX: The Convert-O-Tron ISRU resource extraction and conversion Suite

Even though the Majority of Humanity's industrial capacity happens at the molecular scale (It's called metabolism), and therefore is largely independent of gravity, many of the Macrotechnological products, like Cryogenic fuel and oxidizers for Rockets, Do require significant effects of Gravitation during their manufacture. For example, Heat does not conduct efficiently in Zero-G as there were no convection, Mixtures of different materials will not separate by weight in freefall, and most forms of fluids will just stay there without falling or flowing down when there is no global acceleration. This means that, the traditional process of Precipitation, Solvent Extraction and Fractional Distillation will not work without aid in Microgravity, and even mundane things like heating fluids or maintaining a steady flame becomes nearly impossible.

The solution of this Dilemma, as it turns out, is to use Centrifugal force replace gravity in situations that needed it. The Industrial modules that needed gravity are mounted on the inside of a large, spinning cylinder, connecting to the rest of the modules using sliding ring contacts and rotating junctions and seals. This configuration allows the different Macrotechnological processes including Solvent Extraction, Separation, Condensation, Precipitation, Distillation and Smelting to proceed in artificial "gravity" that allows the more traditional processes to proceed, enabling the refining and production of Cryogenic fuels and Oxidizers from nearly any material that contain volatiles in any situation of gravity. Aluminum, the principle electrical and optical material, can also be produced in such modules.

Now the moon have became the New wild west.

**2001 A.D. Impulse drives and the not-so-bad space odyssey**

The Intensive experiment on the Skylabs have proven fruitful. In 1998, Skylab 31, an research station positioned above continental North America on geostationary orbit, reported discovery of a specific arrangement of mass-electromagnetic devices, that, when powered at a specific frequency, produced anomalous, exhaust-free thrust detectable by the subtle change in orbital motions of Skylab 31 with a power to force ratio P/Fc 1 . The design were then intensively optimized to maximize the effect for a given mass and power level, until the device have evolved into what we known today as the Impulse Drive.

CODEX: Impulse Drives

Impulse Drives are seemingly reactionless thrusters that produced anomalous force when driven at a specific frequency and power levels. However, more thorough examination have revealed the fact that the devices produced high-frequency gravitational waves that interacted with nearby sources of mass-gravity, enabling exchange of momentum with said source of mass-gravity without apparent exhaust nor use of reaction mass. Impulse Drives are one of the most efficient engines available to Humanity for intracluster travel at this point of time, expending no more energy than absolutely needed to change the relative velocity of the spacecraft in respect to the center of local concentrations of mass.

Impulse drives does not work between clusters, or indeed anywhere where the local mass concentration were too thin.

At the year of 2001 A.D., a specific reconnaissance mission were sent to Mars, powered by Impulse drives. The mission spacecraft, Columbus, were the product of a rare collaboration between the KSP and the USKP, and weighs about 150 tons including all supplies. The spacecraft used Solar power to power large arrays of Impulse Drives guided by special computers that focused the beam of gravitational waves to strategically chosen solar system objects, including the sun itself in order to ensure maximum propulsion efficiency. The Columbus accelerated for 6 days for the first half of it's transfer from the earth to the moon, and then decelerated using another 6 days as it approached mars.

However, as the Columbus approaches it's destination, the Spacecraft experienced anomalous acceleration and deceleration, delaying it's approach toward mars and caused the circularization attempts near mars to nearly fail.

CODEX: The Vanguard Anomaly

The Vanguard anomaly refers to the failure of orbital injection and subsequent landing of the KSP's Vanguard spacecraft launched at 1994 around and onto mars, and the subsequent low rate of successful orbital injection and landings of similar missions as predicted by the apparent mass distribution of mars.

It was thought that the origin of the Vanguard anomaly was the result of one or multiple short-ranged/multipolar gravitational anomalies on or near the surface of mars, which are unaccounted for, or indeed unaccountable to any form of pre-flight planning.

Nevertheless, the Columbus managed to inject to a high circular orbit around mars, thanks to it's Impulse Drives that eliminated the delta-V limit of fuel. As the Impulse Drives cut off, no further anomaly were noticed by the crew.

EVOLVED: Impulse Thrusters

EVOLVED can now use built-in Impulse thrusters to propel itself across space near a gravitational body, enabling them to change their orbits, levitate off the ground or even land on planetary surfaces without external aid.

By focusing the Reaction force of the built-in Impulse drive, an EVOLVED can also perform limited forms of telekinesis, exerting attractive or repulsive force between themselves and a target object (They can still lose their footing and get propelled away by the reaction force from said process, as the Newton's Third Law still applies for Impulse based technology).

FLYER: SCRAMJET Engine

A variety of Impulse Drive is now fitted to every FLYER, by pushing directly against the surrounding air using gravitational waves, FLYERs can now propell themselves at speeds not available through wing undulation or even jet propulsion. This technology, dubbed SCRAMJET, allows FLYERs to reach over mach 22 when flying high in the atmosphere and continue to generate force even in low orbit, potentially enabling Single-Stage-To-Orbit(SSTO) vehicles to be constructed and deployed.

Landing pods are ejected from the Columbus, propelled by their internal Impulse Drives, slows down and decelerated toward their destination on the martian surface, landing at places of interest like potential sources of water ice, potential sources of minerals and the many gravitational anomalies that dotted the surface of mars.

As the Pods slowed themselves down in the martian atmosphere, the pods shifted their structure and revealed 5 EVOLVED for each pod, which quickly slowed themselves to a graceful landing on the barren surface of mars. The pods themselves, now revealed itself to be a modified FLYER, stopped their descent and starts to collect data and relay them to the ground teams and the Columbus.

Alan Shepard, who rode one of the pods that landed on top of a gravitational anomaly, landed on the red sands of the surface of mars. The pod itself are affected by the anomaly, and is now a pile of smoking wreckage just in front of her. The crew of five, now scattered across nearly 10 kilometers across, attempted to communicate with each other, and to the Columbus.

"Nephras Alenko Do you copy?"

"Columbus, could you hear me?"

"Desolas williams Do you copy?"

"This is Erphisuas Lawson , coordinate 27.85 S 59.55 W, I can hear you on the communications channel."

Little spots of blue light marked the location of the scattered crew, which promptly regrouped with each other using the communications beams to guide themselves, started to move toward the source of the gravitational anomaly.

A BRAWLER was assembled from the 5 individual crew, which ran swiftly toward it's destination. On the reduced gravity of mars, a BRAWLER runs nearly 3.5 times faster than it could run on the earth, running at blazing speeds of almost 100m/s. The crew uses the BRAWLER's internal sensors to locate and home onto the location directly on top of their target gravitational anomaly.

Now directly on top of the anomaly, the crew used some of the local Iron to assemble a pickaxe and a shovel onto the BRAWLER's front limbs, and started digging into the ground.

"Water 4.5 percent, silicate 50 percent, metal oxides 24.5 percent, organics 1 percent, others 20 percent"

"Reached something unexpectedly hard, switching to diamond sampling drill"

A drill bit tipped with synthetic diamond emerges from a slot on one of the BRAWLER's front limbs, the drill bit starts to vibrate and spin at a high speed, and then started to drill, very slowly, into the encountered hard material.

Screeching noises vibrates through the little tunnel the crew dug from the surface, and what looks like Metal shavings have emerged from the "hard rock" the crew was drilling into. After several hours of extended drilling, with the aid of power that were transmitted from a hastily set-up photosynthetic panel array on the surface, the obstacle finally gives, the solid metal core fell through the hole down to an empty space below, leaving behind a square hole 15x15 centimeters across.

"Split"

The BRAWLER suddenly dissolves, different organic and synthetic components reformed into a long stream that crawls into the hole it have drilled, and reforming into five EVOLVED inside the space under the metal wall.

Alan shepard turns on the light sources on her EVOLVED body, and the internal structure of what the crew have thought to be a cave was revealed.

"Unbelievable"

"This... must be artificial."

"you know, like only be possible to be built by something at least as intelligent as us."

The prothean ruins on mars have been discovered.

**2015 A.D. the Hyperdrive, or the Alcubierre drive**

Back on earth, something new were discovered on the Skylabs.

As the Impulse drive were being perfected, another series of technological experimentation and screening was being conducted on the Skylabs.

Thanks to the Impulse drives, a new set of Skylabs, orbiting the sun instead of the earth, situated at the 5 different Lagrange points on and around the earth's orbit, were launched and deployed at an unprecedented state. The Asteroid belt have been pretty much completely colonized, and the first ultra-thin photosynthetic solar collectors have been deployed between the orbit of venus and mercury, providing the Expanding Human civilization an exponentially increasing supply of chemical and electrical power.

The sun started to look purple when looked from the earth.

The current project was the screening of spacecraft propulsion that may promise faster-than-light, intersystem travel across the low-mass-density empty space between different star systems.

In order to accomplish this, the KSP screens random designs and combinations for signatures of anomalous translations that can not be explained from the registered changes in velocity by external measuring devices and the registered acceleration of the spacecraft by internal accelerometers, and by a change in the mass of the spacecraft sufficient to explain the translation/acceleration in set time by the mean of an exhaust with velocity below the speed of light.

Skylab 46 found just that.

After a constant process of iterative optimization, the contraption discovered by Skylab 46 were improved to the first iteration of the Hyperdrive, otherwise known as the Alcubierre drive. By using a specific interactions of moving, charged objects whose energy density were constantly changed by the mean of an input of AC voltage of a specific frequency, the Hyperdrive generates a distortion of spacetime around itself, which caused the space surrounded by the distortion to be set into motion without causing any movement of the object inside the moving space.

The First experimental Hyperdrives reached 50 percent speed of light without the corresponding energy cost as if the spacecraft was actually accelerated to and decelerated from said velocity, and the subsequent models reached speeds of 10,20 and 50 times speed of light, through continued increases in drive frequency and improvements of the design.

The Oort cloud was colonized, the organisms colonizing the minute bodies using the nuclear fission of heavy, radioactive elements to split water in the form of ice, then metabolizes the resulting hydrogen and hydrogen peroxide/oxygen to generate the necessary energy and assimilated organic carbon to stay warm and grow.

**2025 A.D.**

Mars was developed intensively. With the Hyperdrive, travel within the solar system is now only restricted by a difference in potential energy, and the distance between the earth and mars is now only a trip of about 4.5 to 6.5 minutes including travel time. The Prothean ruins were all but forgotten through time, waiting to be rediscovered, some 50 years later.

**2055 A.D.**

Humanity have settled star systems in a 10 light-year radius surrounding the solar system, adapting as they does so-their photosynthetic constructs turns blue around red dwarves, and yellow around blue stars, their cell cycles modifies and adapts to the day-night cycles of the different planets they have settled, producing spontaneous cycles of work/rest when the "day" was too long or even forever-as on tidally locked planets. Stronger molecular motors were developed on high gravity planets, heated lifting bags were developed on gas giants, fission reactors were employed where there were no access to sunlight.

Sol was now completely surrounded by a bubble of photosynthetic purple membranes that captures more than 1e+27 joules per second, making it appear purple when viewed from afar. The Gas Giants Jupiter and Saturn were strip mined for it's content of methane and ammonia to the point that their mass have decreased to only about half of their original mass, only feasible as there are now more energy available to Humanity than it could ever use.

Enormous fleets of colony and defense ships regularly patrols the inner solar system, and the bioluminescent glow of humanity's constructs can now be seen throughout the entire solar system-from near the surface of the sun to all the toward the edge of the Oort cloud, an entire light-year away.

**2070 A.D.**

An Entrepreneur Alec Ryder, is in the process of developing one of the Kuiper belt object he have recently claimed. The dwarf planet, long forgotten since the recent Boom in inner solar system development, used to have a significant name when Humanity's first spacecrafts were launched-Pluto.

Alec Ryder planned to disassemble most of the pluto's moons to search for heavy' fissile elements to fuel the reactors that are needed to power the mining operations on pluto.

He called to the photosynthetic energy harvesting facility on the inner solar system for help.

5 hours later.

A brilliant beam of red light struck Charon, the largest moon of pluto, and the icy deposits of the moon have started to melt away under the extreme heat. With a total power input of 6.02e+23 joules per second, the Volatile materials of Charon melted and boiled away, producing an enormous tail of evaporating gasses and water vapour. The moon's crust and mantle started to vaporize and boil away, layer by layer.

However, to Alec Ryder's surprise, the core of the moon wasn't the mixture of radioisotope-bearing rock and metals as predicted by the theory of planetary formation and evolution, but a large piece of ancient technology that is eerily familiar yet completely alien to him and the rest of humanity.

Alec Ryder recognized the structure as something that were recorded inside the prothean ruins on mars during the first half of the century.

A thorough exploration mission was launched, as the discovery at pluto managed to sneak it's way into Humanity's extensive information network. The Prothean ruins, rediscovered from piles of ancient data and old records floating on the network, once again became the focus of Humanity's space exploration efforts. As the exploration team thoroughly screened through everything inside the prothean ruins, they discovered data that points to the alien object that were orbiting pluto was a device that were used by the protheans for long-distance travel, many hundred times farther away from the furthest reach of the Current Human civilization.

They discovered plans of something that be used to interact with it and use it, and also the materials that are needed for the construction of said technologies-Element Zero.

CODEX: Nuclear Fusion

Despite the enormous dyson bubble surrounding their sun that provided the entire output of a star to the burgeoning human civilization, the small-scale power generation methods of Humanity is still extremely primitive: chemical energy is used to power most spacecrafts, barely enough to overcome the difference in potential energy between different planets in the same system through the use of the Impulse drive and the Hyperdrive, While Cargo ships that does not need high speeds whil traveling within a star system used Impulse thrusters that are powered by Beamed power. Nuclear fission, performed inside special reactors that split water through ionizing radiation, were used to provide a relatively more energy-dense source of power that is barely enough to overcome the potential energy difference between stars. The low energy density of their power sources have been the single biggest restriction of Human Spaceflight-interstellar vessels have to travel between stars in such a way that the potential energy difference between the two systems does not exceed that is available by the traversing vessel at a time, restricting their interstellar flight to distinct pathways of lowest potential energy difference-"hyperlanes" between the gravitational wells of stars.

These restriction all comes to an end as the Prothean ruins on mars was thoroughly explored and excavated-despite the technological archives suggesting other uses of Element Zero, the first use of this exotic material was for the confinement of Nuclear Fusion.

Despite theory in the early 1980s have already pointed out that nuclear fusion was a viable source of energy, and Despite the Hydrogen Bomb tests in the first half of the 21st century demonstrated that Fusion energy can indeed be released in a scale that is relevant to Human use, none of the efforts to produce controlled fusion have ever succeeded: Magnetic confinement proved impossible, as the Enshaw's theorem proved that it was impossible to really balance and levitate/confine an object, including plasma using magnetic fields alone. Inertial confinement proves to be impossible to perform in an economical scale without a fission trigger-all the different experiments to ignite a fusion reaction using lasers have failed without the use of a fission "spark plug" in the center of the fuel.

However, the discovery of Element Zero have forever changed this- Element Zero naturally generates a gravitational field of either attractive or repulsive nature when rendered to carry an electrostatic charge.

As gravitational fields were unipolar, attractive and conservative, it is incredibly easy to confine all manner of material, including plasmas with said field-after all, stars were fusion reactions that are confined by their own gravity.

Using a primitive Element Zero Core discovered in the protheans's designs, a powerful attractive gravitational field was projected into a vacuum chamber with singularity level field strength near the center of said chamber. A plasma of the Deuterium fuel was then injected into the chamber, which quickly settled towards the center. The Extreme gravitational fields compresses and confines the fuel, heating it up through adiabatic compression and shock heating, until the density and temperature at the center exceeds that is needed to cause fusion-igniting a miniature star in a jar.

Fusion power is finally at reach of Humanity's axopodia.

**2077 A.D. Arcturus**

This is the first time Humanity have attempted travel through a Mass Relay, or a Gate as they called. A small team of entrepreneurs, leaded by Alec Ryder, constructed a small fleet of ships that were fitted with the newest fusion power plants, carefully reached the Charon Gate with minimum power. Alec Ryder sent the specific signal that were specified in the Prothean archives to activate the Gate, and, to all their suprise, the Charon Gate activated smoothly, as if it was just turned off moments ago instead of being buried under hundreds of kilometers of ice and volatiles from probably the start of this Eon.

Alec Ryder stepped through the Gate.

"Is this... Arcturus?"

"Preliminary observation and modeling suggests that this is indeed the star Arcturus 36.17 light years away from the solar system."

"Almost 11 light years outside the farthest distance Humanity have Ever reached across these 50 years... Think of the profits this discovery could bring!"

"Sensors have detected multiple dormant Gates inside this star system, Recommending immediate return to Sol to disseminate this information and call for more help."

"deploying solar collectors"

"Charging...10%...20%...30%...50%...70%...100%..."

"Approaching Arcturus Gate in 3,2,1"

Just as they abruptly left the Sol system, they returned abruptly back to the Gate near Pluto, familiar purple sunlight shining on the hulls of the ships, and there is now an important message they needs to deliver.

"Charging Hyperdrives"

On the Earth.

"The Mission was successful!"

"Think of the possibility..."

"If the Power of just one star brought us to the point of civilization today, think about what kind of glory the power of 170 suns in the same star could bring..."

"Like... Antimatter?"

Antimatter was not difficult to make by Humanity's current standards, by using carefully controlled energy levels and a properly calibrated mass spectrometer, antiprotons and positrons can be generated efficiently in large batches by channeling the power output from Sol. However, confining the antimatter was much, much more difficult, as even minute jostling of the container can lead to annihilation and loss of the antimatter particles, probably the container itself and whatever that was carrying the container.

Also, the power output from just a single Sun-like star turned out to be insufficient to sustain a fleet powered by antimatter, even if the problem of confinement was successfully solved.

"Arcturus have no circumstellar materials to build the solar collectors with, but we could simply transport these materials through the Charon Gate. However, since most of the mass in the solar system have already been claimed and the shipping cost from other star systems were just too high... we afraid that we may have to find another source of matter for this feat."

"Actually, I see many Dormant Gates in the Arcturus system. Could one of them lead to a star system that DO have the needed materials needed for this project?"

"Also, the same Gravitational confinement system based on Element Zero could potentially be used to properly confine the antimatter and potentially enable it's transport and use on ships. So make sure to construct and bring some to the Arcturus system with your fleet."

"let's find out!"

Alec Ryder charged the Hyperdrives of his fleet.

**2078 A.D.**

The Arcturus exploration team have reported good news: from behind One of the Gates in the Arcturus system, a small red dwarf with abundant circumstellar dust material was discovered, and the Carbon,Hydrogen,Nitrogen and Oxygen is now being shipped, en bulk, back to Arcturus to aid in the construction of an identical Dyson Bubble to the sun around the Star Arcturus. (in case of you reader wondering, the solar collectors were exceptionally thin-less than half a gram per centimeter, these collectors are held up by the Star's radiation pressure, and would require only minimal mass to construct even around a giant star like Arcturus.)

From behind the one of the Other Gates, Explorers reported an abundant deposit of Element Zero-Which means that, not only does Humanity had the needed energy to Produce antimatter at a large scale, but they also had the capacity to Store the antimatter as it is being produced.

Development near Arcturus have started.

**2080 A.D.**

The Development around Arcturus have proceeded smoothly, as the Photosynthetic Energy Collection Facility have met it's 10% complete mark, the enormous Antimatter Production Facility have started it's production-Antiprotons and Positrons, produced in carefully calibrated accelerators, are separated from the other products of the reaction by their charge/mass ratio, slowed down, condensed into antihydrogen atoms and then put to storage in giant containers that confined it's content through the use of Gravitational Fields.

Fueled by this source of highly concentrated energy, Human ships no longer needed to stay on the Hyperlanes to travel interstellar distances-after all, even the escape velocity of the Milky Way galaxy were merely 3 percent the speed of light, while the "exhaust velocity" of antimatter annihilation IS the speed of light.

Fueled bu this exotic, high energy fuel, a bubble of expansion nearly 50 light years around Arcturus have been established. Star systems discovered and cataloged, their circumstellar materials strip mined and the stars themselves shrouded in swarms of photosynthetic solar collectors. A Concept, called Star Lifting, have been formulated, however, the implementation of said concept is yet to be developed.

The Ryder team have recently opened a Gate towards the system known as ShanXi, and something...Important... would happen in Humanity's history in this system.

**2130 A.D.**

John Desolas Shepard, a Redlight individual born around Arcturus, oversees the purplish hue of the shrouded Star as His ship coasted toward Gate 314. He have been dispatched to open and explore the Gate and anything beyond it.

The crew fully expected to see another normal system as they typed in the right signal to activate the Gate.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4 Relay 314 Incident**

General Desolas Arterius was patrolling the dormant Mass Relay #314.

"Citadel command, I think that ... that relay was sorta acting... funny."

The small patrol fleet noticed that, the once dormant Mass Relay, was now activated.

Nothing have yet came through though.

"what is that thing?"

"open Hail frequency"

"target not responding. Open fire?"

Desolas Arterius attempted to open fire at the unknown object that suddenly appeared near the now active #314 Mass Relay. He hesitated for a while, and ultimately decided not to open fire on the strange vessel that were scurrying around.

"This is Desolas Arterius to Hiarchy, we have contacted an unknown vessel that were believed to have opened uncharted Relay #314, requesting reinforcements and permission to follow Unknown vessel"

"As you wish. The Turian Navy #5 flotilla will be soon arriving in 2 and half hours from Palaven. Hold your place and do not fire at the unknown vessel, until further notice. Keep an eye on the vessel, follow through the Relay if the vessel decided to move or return."

The unknown small, black vessel turned towards the Turian patrol fleet, and a beam of concentrated blue light were shone upon the bridge of The Unyielding Law.

On the Human side.

"Everyone, we have a first contact situation. Contacting the Unknown vessel on the Hail channel."

"Sending prime number table..."

"Sending Codex data and language decoding data..."

Unfortunately, the communications beam that was meant to establish contact with the Turian patrol vessel were shone directly into General Desolas Arterius's eyes.

It also happened that, flashes that corresponds to the first 10 prime numbers in Human Encoding broadcast on that specific frequency of light causes an especially nauseating reaction to Turian physiology.

The entire bridge deck of The Unyielding Law was now in chaos, with every turian on Observation Deck vomiting everything they have eaten during the entire day out, falling down onto the floor from the intense disorienting nausea and occasionally knock over cups of some sort of tea down into the consoles, which caused a shower of sparks and smoke billowing into the small deck space of the Bridge.

Desolas Arterius, barely regaining balance from the intense nausea, ordered the crew to "stabilize, wait for orders and open fire on the unknown vessel as soon as the reinforcements arrived... Cough Cough"

"Alien vessel acting... funny?"

"I don't think that sort of reaction is a gesture of responding to hails or greeting..."

"Let's retreat."

John Desolas Shepard piloted his scout/exploration vessel back through the Gate.

"Reinforcements have arrived"

"This is Spectre Saren Arterius on behalf of the council."

"This is Primarch Fedorian of the #5 flotilla. Confirm target Hostile. Pursuing through relay #314"

"This is General Desolas Arterius of The Unyielding Law. Hostile have unknown memetic / cognitohazardous attack against organics. Do NOT open observatory windows, We may well have another Rachni war at our hands."

"LIDAR and IR sensors at full capacity. Permission granted to shoot anything that appears on the other side. Transiting in Three, Two, One."

ShanXi. 3 minutes later.

"that was a close one..."

"hope that the first contact of Humanity not end in disaster..."

John Desolas Shepard powered on the Hyperdrive, and slid across space at superluminal velocities towards the colony and Energy Harvesting Facility in the inner system of ShanXi.

"My Spirits..."

"Spectrometer readings indicates that the local starlight was purple-Something that should never happen naturally."

"LIDAR readings indicates nothing near partner relay #314. Nothing, Even Asteroids."

"Image sensor indicates that the Star system have one and only one planet orbiting at 1AU around a class G0 star. Planet show signs of liquid water and appears to be habitable."

"Detected Major heat and narrow spectrum radiation readings. I think the planet was colonized."

Primarch Fedorian piloted the dreadnought The Eternal Justice towards what their sensors though to be an isolated planet with minimal defense using FTL propulsion. The transit took about 5 minutes.

But little to his knowledge, the ShanXi system was anything but defenseless.

"Light Harvesting Complex #228100 detected alien vessels approaching on 11°direction in relative to planet"

"Prepare for fight"

"defense fleet #2021 launching, defense fleet #2022 launching, redirecting transport #14414 for interception."

"Ready to Beam energy toward defenses."

"ShanXi base prime detected orbital insertion of the Alien vessels, All units Hold fire until signs of aggression shows."

"MPT station #10,#11,#20 at maximum capacity."

"Defense fleet #2021 MPT energized, Defense fleet #2022 MPT energized."

"Nitrogen defense lasers fully charged."

"Luciferin mobilization complete."

"Redirecting reflectors on Light Harvesting Complex #312001, #202381 and #122800 toward alien vessels, ready visible light sensors and spectrometers for scanning."

Suddenly, a bright light was shone onto the Turian Naval flotilla #5, on the face of Saren Arterius and on the face of Primarch Fedorian.

"Alien main vessel length measured at 1500 meters, with multiple other vessels ranging from 400 m to 600m in length. Significant Element Zero signature detected. Vessel shape resemble winged aircrafts with golden markings on a white hull material. Vessel may possess atmospheric flight capacity."

"This is Saren Arterius, I See orbital targets. Open fire."

The Eternal Justice fired a mass accelerator round at Defense Vessel #2021.2 at 2.5 percent the speed of light. The accelerated round flew straight into the vessel, ploughing a hole right through the center, tearing Biomass out towards different directions. However, to the horror of the Turians on Naval flotilla #5, the hole quickly starts to repair itself, fragments of torn biomass attracted towards the small autonomous spacecraft as if being attracted by magnets, different pieces of debris reattaches to the missing parts of the vessel, and the small seams the reassembling parts and biomass left behind quickly started to close up, pulled together by numerous fibrils that bridges across the gap, while the small scorch marks that were left by the direct hit by the mass accelerator round simply dissolved into the Hull and disappears. Within one minute, Defense Vessel #2021.2 have completely repaired itself, and looked as if it was never hit by even a small meteor, let long a mass accelerator round shot from a dreadnought.

"Target Hostility confirmed, beaming energy toward point of encounter."

"Defense fleet #2021, distract the enemy and slow them down, defense fleet #2022, ready first contact protocol on the enemy, defense fleet #2023,#2024 and #2025, block off the escape route of the enemy vessels."

Numerous small spacecrafts and space objects activated, floating towards the Turians as if they were being attracted by a source of enormous gravity originated from the Turian fleet. The small vessel that have been shot and pulled itself back together suddenly started to accelerate, producing a trail of brilliantly shining particles as it starts to move erratically between the different frigates and cruisers of Turian Navy flotilla #5.

A beam of eerie blue light shone on the Turian vessels, many frigates started to lose control and starts to rock and wobble around as if their pilots were drunk as the flashes of light hits their bridge windows-Turian frigate cockpits can not be fully blinded, and the flashes of light have passed through.

"GARDIAN turrets reports accuracy less than 5 percent! Fire all the side-mounted guns!"

The entire fleet started to shoot out laser beams and mass accelerator rounds randomly toward every direction ,as the numerous Autonomous Defense vessels of the ShanXi colony surrounds every vessel of the invading fleet, spraying shiny particles from their rear ends as they does so.

"Sensors blinded! Targeting system malfunctioning! The interference were too high!"

"Weapon systems have started to overheat, these things can't even be slowed by our weapons and defenses."

"Attempt FTL escape"

"Unable to commence FTL jump. ERROR: Obstacle ahead."

"Override! Override! Override!"

Saren Arterius managed to find a split-second gap between the swarming defense vessels, and escaped toward relay #314 using the FTL of his frigate.

However, the other vessels of the invading fleet were not so lucky-an enormous beam of brilliant red light suddenly hits the battlefield, and everything on it's path, the remaining Turian ships, the surrounding defense vessels, the shiny particles, debris and stray rounds, were vaporized within milliseconds by the entire power output of ShanXi's star. The Turians have became the target of the first test fire of a Nicoll-Dyson beam.

And it is incredibly effective.

On the Human side, nobody was lost-the defense vessels were autonomous, remotely controlled from the nearest Light Harvesting Complex or directly from the planet, and the small loss of mass were quickly replenished from the byproduct of the antimatter manufacturing processors-a sun-like star radiates out energy of equivalent to more than 4 million tonnes of mass per second, and all the vessels that were vaporized had a sum mass of just over 2.01 kilotons-less than 1/2000th of the production of the ShanXi facility per second.

Saren Arterius barely made it through relay #314, and, there, he heard an even more Embarrassing news-the "memetic/cognitohazardous attack against organic life" turned out to be an encoded First Contact package, and the Salarians have already confirmed that the intense nausea was the result of a glitch in Turian physiology- their eyes and balance organs become Over-sensitized and causes intense nausea when exposed to flashes of light centered around 490nm that corresponds to the rhythm of the first 10 primes.

Councilor Tevos: "This is the most Embarrassing incident since our first encounter with the Volus! First Contacts should NOT be processed by any of the council races alone, also a first contact team is not supposed to ride on Military vessels, or fire weapons on random targets that have held their fire UNTIL THE LAST SECOND!"

Councilor Sparatus: "But they fired first! And it's they who broke the law regarding activtion of dormant relays the first place!"

"They have never contacted Citadel before! They couldn't possibly know about OUR laws. Also, as a race that have yet to have an embassy on the citadel, they are officially outside the jurisdiction of Citadel Law until they enters Citadel space, dear Councilor Spartus? Did you remember your first contact with the Volus, the ones that were based on ammonia instead of water, that, their ammonia and methane based atmosphere nearly gassed half of the citadel when their when ships arrived and docked at the citadel and their airlock opened to the Citadel in the first time?"

"How did the Turian Hierarchy react during that incident? Your kind used to stay Calm and stay Cool during the entire incident, even helped to create the pressure suits the Volus still wear when meeting other races today!"

"Also, Saren Arterius, YOU ARE FIRED! You have now made an enemy with potentially the most powerful race in the entire Galaxy! The Council could not take the chance warring with someone, or something, that could make an entire Flotilla disappear without letting through even a distress call! Our military could not even stand a chance!"

Counciler Valern:"We should rearrange a first contact meeting and say sorry to whatever the Turian Hierarchy have met beyond relay 314. Every time we met a new race, our technology have improved dramatically from the resulting technological exchange."

"They have provided us the necessary protocols and their 'language' for communication with them in their first contact package. We suggest perform an active first contact the second time they emerged from that relay."

"Also, the space near Relay #314 is now officially under military control of the Citadel Council. We must ensure that your Turian ships are not the first things they see on the other side of their partner relay."

"Over."

CODEX: Dyson Shells, Dyson Swarms and Dyson Bubbles

Contrary to popular belief, a Dyson sphere is not only possible, but incredibly easy. In fact, building a partial Dyson sphere/swarm/bubble is easier than achieving practical fusion in Our universe, and they also can provide far much energy than any fusion-based installation could ever hope to produce. The way to achieve this? Don't actually live on it.

Surely, the Traditional image of a Dyson sphere, or better known as a Dyson Shell, an enormous solid shell compressive megastructure with the diameter of the star's habitable zone and hosting trillions of organic beings on the inner surface is not only unrealistic to build, but physically impossible - a Solid shell will not exert any forces of gravity anywhere in the inside, nothing, including land, air, water and the inhabitants would be able to stand on the inside, and therefore is also intrinsically unstable toward perturbations, not counting the fact that no material could ever be able to support such a construct's own weight without collapsing in the first place.

However, if "to collect most of the star's power output for use by some means" was the goal, instead of the fictious idea of providing nearly infinite landmass to host organics on the inside of a sort of "inverted earth", then, it turned out, neither do you need a continuous, solid shell structure, nor do you need to place it inside the star's habitable zone.

The solution? Dyson swarms and Dyson bubbles.

Both solutions replaces the solid shell structure of a given thickness with a swarm of independent, human-scale energy collectors and/or habitats. In a Dyson swarm, each of the elements have a specific orbit around the star, supporting themselves against the star's gravity just as a planet would do. In a Dyson bubble, the mass of said elements are further reduced, so the individual solar collectors and elements are supported by the Radiation pressure from the star.

Since both starlight and Gravity follows an inverse square law, the maximum Area density required for the individual structures to be supported by the radiation pressure of the star is constant for any given star at every distance-3.5g/m^2 for Sol and 541g/m^2 for Arcturus. Ironically, the more massive the star is, the heavier by unit sunlit area each element can be for it to be supported by the star's radiation pressure. If your solar collectors can not be made that light or that thin, you can alvays give each of the elements an orbital velocity to compensate for the large weight.

And such a structure turned out to be quite light compared to the scale of energy they can collect-a Dyson bubble with radius of 1AU around Sol would be at most as massive, combined, as a medium sized asteroid, and since sunlight increases as you approaches the sun, the closer you can get your solar collectors to the sun without the collectors themselves melting, the more efficient they become and the less mass is needed for a structure of the same power capacity around any given star.

For Humanity, the closest they can get their photosynthesizing Light Harvesting Complexes to a sun-like star is slightly closer than the orbit of Venus. Most of their solar collectors are mirrors, produced by depositing aluminum on a backing of UV-hardened polymer of fatty acids and phospholipids, this structure have an average area density of 0.88 grams per square meter. These mirrors then reflect the starlight to a small sheet of photosynthesizing membranes composed of the pigment of choice for that specific type of star. For a star like Sol, the preferred pigment is purple, the counter-color of green. The needed wavelengths are absorbed, and the discarded wavelengths are reflected toward outer space.

Photosynthesis produces energy in the form of NADPH, ATP and O2. While some of the energy is used to make sugars on the site for refueling the various ships and vessels of Humanity, majority of the energy is converted to a collimated beam of light on in the red part of the visible light spectrum and exported toward other targets and energy sinks in the star system, occasionally even across stars.

CODEX: Human weaponry

As the vast majority of Humanity's technology is based on molecular bio-nanotechnology, Human technology is Exceptionally good and efficient at converting and transmitting energy, but also Exceptionally bad at generating or storing energy. Most Human industry rely on Beamed power-both Visible light and Microwave based transmission are used to ship energy from the Energy Harvesting Facility to the numerous places and projects that uses it.

On the space side, Humans uses primarily energy weapons for most situation-both in the form of bioluminescence based chemical lasers and weaponized energy transmission beams. An average Human defense vessel is capable of producing up to 700 megawatts of laser power, exploration vessels, 2.81 gigawatts, Cruisers, 24 gigawatts, dreadnought class vessels, up to 11 terawatts. However, as the energy weapons are powered by a chemical reaction, a Human vessel can only fire so long before it's reserves of the chemicals are depleted. Luckily, Hyperdrives can enter FTL anywhere in spacetime, even if there are obstacles ahead-a vessel using the Hyperdrive will simply pass through the obstacle without interaction, as the opening of the local space "bubble" is contracted to planck scales. Therefore, once out of ammo, a Human vessel can always retreat and reload at the nearest facility that is capable of supplying them.

However, once inside their own system, Humanity is nearly unbeatable-each star puts out energy on the order of 1e+27 joules per second, most of which is captured and available for transmission to anywhere within the star system. Once inside the star system, each and every armed Human vessel can now produce laser power at the maximum of what their weapon system can produce, for an arbitrary amount of time. However, the most lethal defensive weapon a Human system have is a Nicoll-Dyson Beam-the entire output of the Energy Harvesting Facility can be directed to any single point within the star system, and even 1/100th of the entire output of a star can reduce entire fleets down to their constituent elementary particles-in miliseconds.

The only drawback of this weapon is speed-as the light/microwave beams that delivers the energy travels at the speed of light, it can take anywhere from 8 minutes to 2 hours and 30 minutes for an attack to arrive at it's target. As intra-system vessels are already always receiving a beam of energy to power their drives through careful planning and millisecond-level precision control, local Defense vessels can mobilize quickly and slow, or even stall, their enemy until the Nicoll-Dyson Beam arrives.

CODEX: Antimatter

Antimatter is the opposite of normal matter-same mass as normal matter, and every other property is inverted. Once made contact with normal matter, they annihilate each other and release all their mass-energy in the form of quickly decaying bosonic particles and ultimately light.

This process is extremely energy dense-up to 1.8e+17 joules of energy can be released from a kilogram of antimatter and matter annihilating each other, and this source of energy is the principle power source for Interstellar vessels-as they travels at FTL velocities using their Hyperdrives when traveling from star to star, Interstellar vessels can not recieve beamed power from a star system's Energy Harvesting Facility, and therefore must carry it's own source of power. Shorter range Hyperdrive-capable vessels uses fusion power instead, as Fusion power is much safer than antimatter, in the sense that their fuel containers will not explode when ruptured.

Antimatter is produced in specialized facilities near the Energy Harvesting Facility around each star. Here, mesons are accelerated to carefully-controlled energy levels and collided in a strong electric field. The resulting burst of particles are then separated by their charge, slowed down using a combination of a penning trap that removes heat from the antiparticles to the point of atom formation and a Zeeman slower that cools the resulting atoms down to the point of condensation. The result is Antihydrogen ice- a diamagnetic, fluffy solid that functions as the principle form of antimatter storage.

Antimatter is stored in specialized "antimatter confinement units" that uses a strong gravitational field generated by an element zero core that points toward the center of a vacuum chamber to confine the antihydrogen ice and keep it from touching the walls of the vessel. These units require Element Zero to build and function, and therefore is only used when absolutely necessary-for use on intersystem-capable vessels that can not receive beamed power in transit.

Since the Relay 314 incident, Antimatter have recently found interest in advanced forms of weaponry-annihilation of matter and antimatter in a controlled magnetic pinch can crowd the resulting neutral mesons to nuclear densities, which forms the Upper GeV energy level for a powerful gamma ray laser-a single gamma ray photon is released from one end of the pinch discharge channel, and a cascade of gamma rays converts the antimatter-matter plasma efficiently into an intense pulse of laser light. The fields of the pinch absorbs the recoil and transmit the momentum to charged mesons that forms a significant fraction of the plasma, shoving them backwards in a brilliant flash of x-rays and electrons, while the laser pulse shoots out of the front with more packed energy than one hundred kilotons of TNT exploding at once. Pretty impressive for a race that could not even make and use Dynamite.

Since antimatter is extremely energy dense, an antimatter powered weapon system could potentially fire thousands of pulses before the reserves of energy is exhausted (for a system that carries 10 kilograms of antihydrogen-hydrogen mix), dramatically increases the longevity of a vessel in a fight.

Niche uses of antimatter including in particle beams that are used for cutting prothean-grade materials in scientific research and xenoarchaeology-since all materials that are stable against being touched are composed of Matter, a stream of antimatter will react with and annihilate away any material composed of matter at least one atom at a time, no matter how strong the material is or how exotic the material is bonded together. Scout teams have found a Gate that does not respond to activation-probably because it's partner Gate was missing or destroyed, and this Antiparticle beam have proven extremely effective at cutting through the material Gates are built from. It will be only a matter of time before the secret of the Gates are revealed to Humanity.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5 The Citadel, The Humans, and Commander Shepard****'****s favorite store on Citadel.**

(writer's note)

(First, the Humans in this work are NOT overpowered-even they have the access to the power output of literally a thousand suns, their understanding of science was extremely primitive in the other hand-Because the prothean ruins on mars have been breached and left open for almost 50 years before a thorough excavation have taken place, and because the mostly nanotechnology based Human civilization being completely unfamiliar to the concept of a computer interface, or the concept of a computer system other than their own Macronuclei in general, Humanity's understanding of Mass Effect physics was extremely limited-They knows that by incorporating Element Zero in certain Gravity-manipulating techs improves their effectiveness, they knows that Positively charged Element Zero attracts and Negative charged Element Zero repels. Otherwise, they are basically Newbs. Because the Humans in this work are not based on quantum consciousness, they are completely incapable of producing the Spark of Genius like the other races can.(which means that they are also incapable of being Indoctrinated. Will be used in following chapters.) They does not have the Scientific method and does all their R&D through trials and error. The Impulse Drives and the Hyperdrives were the result of exhaustive screening by experimentation and aggressive optimization-they literally combed through every possible combinations of inputs/devices they know of and found one that does what they needs, and the improved upon that configuration using aggressive trials and errors. Humans may have Invented these technologies and perfected them to the point that their implementation outclasses the entire galaxy, but none of them know how exactly it works other than this thing works, some changes made it work worse and some change made it work better-Basically an artificial form of Evolution. As for the Dyson swarms/Bubbles, In Real Life it was estimated that these constructs can be built using only 1980s technology providing a sufficiently large state power/private enterprise that is willing to investigate the(moderate amount) of funding needed to build the first solar collector, and the rest will simply roll bigger and bigger as the energy being collected is sufficient to build and deploy a second solar collector, the two collects the energy for two more, and so on. And the Humans in this AU are anything but lacking in funding or labor. And, yes, the Exponential increase of collected energy can in deed allow such swarms/bubbles/ to be built within decades without the use of any form of automation-you can just grow more crops to feed more workers as long as you had the energy from the existing solar collectors to do it. Given time, even a Bronze Age civilization can build a Dyson Swarm using entirely Manual Labour within the order of 10^3 years.)

()Is what the writer thought about for the specific content. Enjoy:)

**2142 A.D.** **Presidium, Citadel**

Urdnot Wrex was having a bad time. As recent news about the formal first contact with the new, mysterious race that were called "Humans" in their first contact package circulated throughout the extranet, the citadel have seemed to undergo a form of lockdown-C-sec agents everywhere, new scanners were set up and even the electronics were constantly being monitored. Which means that Urdnot Wrex have effectively been grounded on the citadel. He is currently sitting with someone called Patriarch at a bar in the Presidium. Right next to the Krogan monument.

It appeared that the Citadel is even more cautious than the Humans.

**Serpent Nebula, Widow**

The council was seated in Destiny Ascension-their "guest" have just went through one of the many Primary Relays surrounding the Citadel, and whatever that went through was completely alien to them.

Alan Shepard was currently piloting the newest exploratory vessel, Arcturus #22, coming with him, Proxima #2101, Proxima #3001, Sol #11 and Sirius #102. Humanity have decided that the best way to have a peaceful official first contact with the other alien race that called themselves the Asari was to proceed with small vessels. Hence the Frigate class and Cruiser class vessels that were selected for the first contact team.

Councilor Tevos: "So...strange."

Councilor Spartus: "It seems like that whatever propulsion they use it is not a form of reaction drive. There were no exhaust to speak of..."

Councilor Valern: "And there is scant heat signature...either. It appeared that the external temperature of their ship is an uniform 298.15 K, no internal or external heat sources or sinks detected."

Spartus: "Their ships are also far to small for what they have shown to be capable of during the Relay 314 Incident."

Valern: "Maybe their technology is just ... different. I see no Element Zero signatures whatsoever coming from these vessels. Maybe that they are either deficient in Element Zero or their technology is just...different. Not more advanced than ours, but just different."

Spartus: "It makes sense then-Every form of interstellar propulsion as we know it must either need an astronomical amount of energy or rely on Element Zero. These vessels have no Element Zero emissions, and therefore-"

Tevos: "Therefore they must have went through the route that used the astronomical amount of energy."

Spartus: "Then the sudden disappearance of our enforcement fleet was completely understandable-Nihilus reported seeing the Home Star of the ShanXi system being purple in colour before their communication cuts off-the result of a Dyson Sphere being used to collect the energy. It was estimated that even 1/200th of the total output of a star like the sun could accelerate a vessel like that to relativistic velocities within seconds."

Tevos: "Or vaporize an entire Turian flotilla within milliseconds."

The council was interrupted as the Destiny Ascension received a beam of the same eerie blue light coming from the leading vessel. The jury-rigged translator converted the optical signal into Asari, and the following message showed up on their screen.

"This is Commander Alan Shepard representative of the Human Civilization. Requesting to dock with the Citadel."

"That's affirmative. Dock 23B is now available to your vessels."

Two Turian cruisers were dispatched toward the Human fleet, and the small fleet of five was guided gracefully to the docking bays on the Presidium.

Turian commander 1: "It...is eerily silent."

Turian commander 2: "The ships are accelerating, but no exhaust whatsoever was detected. Still. "

Turian commander 1: "So it was not chemical propulsion. Their motion... almost organic. But I failed to see any biotic signature, either."

Arcturus #22 gracefully glided into docking bay 23B, as if pulled by a gentle force of gravity. The other ships did the same, and landed inside the other docking bays destined for them. A gravitational anomaly disturbed the glowing nebula, producing a shimmering trail of luminescence.

The prothean-designed docking port system struggles to find an airlock on the sleek, almost crystal-like vessel that refused to show any signature of internal motion or structure, before one part of the Onyx-black "Hull" of Arcturus #22 started to shift and change shape. Microscopic fibrils and what looked like Nanites shivered and shriveled, and a structure consists of the same Onyx-like material emerged from the hull like it was part of the design. The structure extended out of the vessel, shifting between multiple different shapes, before mating perfectly with the prothean-designed docking port device. As if it was already designed for it.

The docking signal turned green, and the Airlock on the citadel side opened, revealing a figure that vaguely resembles a suit of armor, or rather made of the same Onyx-like crystalline material as their ship. The figure walked down the docking port, and what looks like the helmet part of the armor collapsed and disappeared into the suit, revealing a face that resembled an Asari with masculine features. And with fur instead of tentacles on the top of it's head. Another two figures walked out, dressed in the same strange crystalline material, which also collapses to reveal another masculine face and a feminine face. The Masculine face had a hood over his head, and the feminine face had what appeared to be even longer fur on top of it's head that falls off to the "shoulder" of the figure.

Alan Shepard forms an EVOLVED from the biomass of the vessel, followed by Alex Mercer and Ashley Williams. Their face was designed from the preliminary telemetry of the major races of the Citadel and their Codex which was transmitted to them during their first contact with the Asari-Asari is used as the basal design, masculine elements came from the Turians and Batarians, feminine elements came from the Quarians and Drell.

"Scanning for casual dressing designs..."

"Activating GAN-CNN transfer network... Processing complete."

"Shifting..."

The onyx-like armor shifted and collapsed into their bodies, revealing clothes not unlike that of a Turian or an Asari civilian of the citadel. Alan Shepard now dressed in a suit and leggings that resembles Turian, Ashley Williams in a jumpsuit that resembles Avina on the citadel, and Alex Mercer in a hoodie that resembles Batarian and jeans that resembles that of the Drell.

Urdnot Wrex broke out from a hidden door in Docking Bay 23B. Still drunk and dizzy from the Ryncol he have drank with Patriarch in that bar, Wrex gurgled out a word "Pay for my Launch, Xenos" and charged at the three. Only to find himself suddenly floating in midair as he couldn't feel gravity any more.

Ashley Williams: "Why you can't be more polite when meeting with your new guest?"

Alan Shepard: "Is him of a council race?"

C-sec officer: (Spirits, Is that Asari? A new race that can speak perfect Asari without seeing any of us beforhand at all. No wonder the tight security.) "No. He have just broke into this area drunk, and was murmuring the words 'Pay for my lunch, Xeno' and 'It's all these "Human"'s fault that I have to be grounded on this station for another entire week'. We will deal with him."

Alex Mercer: "Which race is him? I didn't see this when we read your Codex.

C-sec officer: "He is Krogan. Recently came to the Citadel with his old friend 'Patriarch'. He came from Omega, Terminus systems. Sorry for the inconvenience."

Alan Shepard: "Ashley, put him down."

Ashley Williams shut down her Impulse traction, and Urdnot Wrex suddenly feel the presence of gravity again-and proceed to fall, rather heavily, onto the metallic floor of the Docking Bay.

Ashley Williams: "What's your name?"

C-sec officer: "Garrus Vakarian. I thought we will be having first contact with a race of robots, or tentacle monsters. Not something that resembled an Asari."

Garrus: "Anyway, is that your true form? Everyone on the citadel have known your kind are shapeshifters from the live coverage of the first contact with your kind."

Alex Mercer: "Closest we can get to the shape of our cells. We are a race of microbes. We don't have a face as cells."

Alan Shepard: "This Avatar was selected to be both representative to our race and not be a cognitohazard to the sensory systems of Metazoa like you. We don't want to repeat the same incident as my brother John Nicolas Shepard did to some...militants of your race."

Ashley Williams: "Your response appears to be satisfactory. Maybe we should use this same avatar for meeting with the council as well."

Garrus Vakarian: "..."

(In case you wonder that how did the Humans managed to speak in sound and know perfect Asari in their first contact, these ones are a highly specialized first contact team that have studied the culture of the Citadel Races through the Codex and language/history files sent by the Asari first contact team. And yes, they already knew that most of the citadel Metazoa uses sound waves in a gaseous medium of 80 percent N2 and 20 percent O2 at 299.15K and 101.3 Kpa as their principle mean of communication. And they have pre-planned their own translation system just for this moment. In case if you are wondering, the EVOLVED design used in the first contact team included a loudspeaker and the proper voice synthesizer/translator specifically designed for communicating with Metazoa, and the face of their Avatars are just lip-syncing to the voice synthesizer/loudspeaker using a Generative Adversarial Network to produce what Citadel Races perceives as being natural. (Think Legion) As indicated by comments, this didn't play out well... Blame the Uncanny Valley for this effect.)

(As for the light based first contact signal-Humanity in this work is based on bio-nanotechnology. They have no radios. (That is to say that they do not how a radio works.) And sound waves don't exactly propagate in a vacuum, even they know that Citadel Races uses Sound waves to talk. Hence the light based first contact signal.)

(Yes, Citadel news reporters are just as fast at broadcasting this historical event to everyone on board as the Human spacecraft is at forming a proper docking tube for the docking mechanism of the Citadel to dock with. Therefore literally everyone knows that Humans shape-shifted into their current Avatars from the stunt they pulled off during the First Contact team's introduction to Docking Bay 23B. The news went viral just as it would be in real life.)

(GAN=Generative Adversarial Network. A type of neural network that are often used to create the filter effects you often see in ArtCam, BeautyCam and other artistic image-processing apps you can find and install on mobile phones. Here, GANs are used to synchronize the First Contact Teams' EVOLVED to a clothing style that is considered acceptable by Citadel Metazoa.)

(CNN=Convolutional Neural Network. A type of neural network that is used in machine vision. Also used to create the surreal, Lovecraftian artwork known as Deep Dream. CNNs are used in A.I. "Creative" artwork. like the pictures you often see in CAPTCHA. Here, CNNs are used to synthesize the faces of the EVOLVED used by the first contact team in order to look friendly to the Citadel Races. And reporters.)

(Yes. These Humans are an embodiment of Big Data.)

(In Real Life a complex multicultural society like the Citadel will have every quirk and feature of the Real Life Internet/News complex in terms of news coverage and social networking. News that are bound to go viral within minutes in Real Life will likely go viral within a minute on Citadel. Just like Tweeter/Facebook.)

(Citadel Metazoa are not as stupid as they are in the Games. That kind of information coverage is too 20th-century. Not what you should expect in year 2142. It's not that I am bad at writing Dialog, it is just that what passes for a First Contact in the Games is totally unrealistic. Remember that social networking like that of today and of near future did not exist back in the time Bioware created Mass Effect. Nor did Big Data like what we are familiar today existed back in year 2008. We now knew better.)

**Council Chambers, Citadel Tower**

Udina: "Greetings from the Human Alliance(totally made-up as the Humans are not unified under politics as other races does). My name is Udina. Ambassador of the Human race."

Spartus: (Is this a V.I. from the rogue synthetic shapshifters that we are told to befriend rather than kill?) "Greeting from the citadel council Ambassador. We are sorry for the incident that happened in your...ShanXi system."

Tevos: "We are graceful to exchange technology with you, but not before a reparation to the Incident at Relay 314 was paid."

Udina: "We can pay in material and energy. We really didn't lose anything in that incident. And we can not pay anything else as we are not truly multicellular or politically unified as your races."

Spartus: (We want to see your entire race dead&enslaved&sliced to micrometer thick slices for research)"We want you to be subject to the laws of the Citadel council as a client race of the Turian Hierarchy. Also, in order to possess a proper embassy on the Citadel you must be subjected to the Treaty of Farixen and the Citadel Convention and The Treaty of..."

Udina: "We will be fully compliant to your laws in Citadel space. However, as our condition of being at peace with the Citadel your council may not reach beyond Relay 314 or Gate #314 of the ShanXi system or to interfere with our internal affairs."

Spartus replied, mandibles clenched: "No, That's not all..."

Valern: "Spartus stop. Remember that they have vaporized one entire flotilla of ours in one of their systems behind the Relay without even letting out a distress call. In Citadel space our fleets could overwhelm their ineffective naval power, but with that levels of energy we will be atoms in milliseconds should we ever trespasses the border of any of their systems. In an attempt of annexation."

Valern: (Your entire race should be enthusianized under our laws regarding artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. And...)"We will accept your payment of 1e+24J·S^-1 and 1e+8 kg·S ^-1 various construction materials&energy, free services for construction in Citadel space and the Impulse Technology as reparation for the Relay 314 Incident."

Tevos: "We will initiate a full technology exchange with the Human Alliance. The STG will be aiding in your research."

Valern: "And as the standard gift of every first contact an archive of basic Mass Effect physics and technology no later than 5000B.C. would be available to the Human Alliance for free."

Udina: "Thank you."

(Yes, Udina is a V.I. specifically designed to be an Ambassador of the Human race. Just like the Geth V.I. is specifically designed to be an Ambassador of the Geth race. and Humanity definitely didn't forget to include a loudspeaker and voice synthesizer for that purpose.)

**Presidium, club Purgatory**

Alan Shepard: "We just left Udina there?"

Alex Mercer: "But he have already earned himself the place as the Human Ambassador in the citadel. No matter what you want to say, Udina have to stay."

Urdnot Wrex: "Thanks for saving my quads. Now your race had an embassy and I got to go on for my adventure once more since the lockdown have been lifted."

Ashley Williams: "Cheers!"

Garrus Vakarian took a sip at the drink provided by the Turian bartender. As a Dextro Amino Acid race, he can not take part in the drinking contest between the Humans and the Krogan. A sip of Ryncol could have killed him stone dead and turn every amino acid and every protein in his body into a steaming puddle of boiled organic matter. Or as the Humans called "Biomass". It seems like that the Humans did not even budge under the strong, almost radioactive booze.

Alex Mercer: "Thanks for that V.I. you gave me."

Garrus Vakarian: "What-"

The Turian bartender looks at a small box of refined Element Zero Shepard just pulled out of his body and put onto the bar as payment, and a piece of cellulosic material with the word "I am Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite club on the Citadel." written in standard Asari, in what seems like Batarian blood. Or what passes for blood of the semi-synthetic shapeshifters that are now officially called "Humans" by the council.

Garrus Vakarian: "Hey, you could have used credits for the payment!"

Alan Shepard: "But there would still be at least a week before that Asari corporation could make an Omni tool small enough to be suitable for use by microbes HAK HAK HAK"

**Human Embassy, Presidium, One Month after first contact**

Udina looks at his newly fitted Omni tool as the various negotiations are already underway.

The Human Construction Fleets are already dispatched into Citadel Space, Terminus Systems and even the Geth Space.

First Contact with the Geth proved to be almost too smooth, as at the basic level Humans share the same algorithms as the Geth for their Mind. When the Humans agreed to help in the construction of the orthodox Geth's stellar Shell, the Geth agreed to share some of their Eezo-Enhanced materials with Humanity, and the construction progress of the Shell have already proceeded for more than 1 percent within a week. As another agreement, the Humans agreed to carry some of the Geth programs in their own bodies and fleets to allow them to experience the culture of Organics in the Terminus Systems and even Citadel Space without being detected as being A.I.s.

The Citadel space have been under a systematic survey by STG #12, STG #22 and STG #31. due to the strict laws made by the citadel regarding the presence of Human biomass and technology in their space, the joint Human/Geth agents used disguise and subterfuge to infiltrate many of the Citadel Council's more secret installations. (by consuming/taking the form of key researchers and members of other non-human races.) News of the STGs finding something "Unnerving" have been circulating on the Human information networks.

The Turians first tried to resist the conditions made by Humanity under the face of the Human Alliance, but as the dispatched construction fleet started to churn out dreadnoughts like candies out of a modern food factory, the last of the Turians's concerns was gone.

According to the Treaty of Farixen, for every 7 dreadnoughts owned by the Turians, the Asari may own 5, the Salarians may own 3, and other non-council races may own one dreadnought, publicly. This fact have been exploited by Humanity-the naval vessels Humanity helps to construct was of an outdated design adopted by the Turians, with specific backdoors and technological blockades in place in order to make them useless when confronting Humanity, and for every 7 Dreadnoughts Humanity help the Turians to construct, Humans could pull another dreadnought-class vessel out from behind Relay #314 without running into legal trouble with the Citadel, and the effective rate of claiming influence in the larger Galaxy is increased by one Dreadnought. The Asari, the Salarians and every other race, which includes the Volus, the Hanar and the Krogans also received their own dreadnoughts in accordance to the same treaty.

The exploration fleets have also discovered the Quarian Migrant Fleet. Which, after a careful infiltration plan, 10 of the elite STG members managed to infiltrate the Migrant Fleet by disguising as Quarians that have finished their pilgrimage. Which, because of the low genetic and metabolic diversity of Metazoan life, nothing more than a (metaphoric) piece of cake. These infiltration agents will start to rank up in the Migrant Fleet, consuming/replacing important leaders if necessary, and eventually bring the Quarians into peaceful contact/understanding of Humanity, the Citadel and the Geth.

Technological exchange with the citadel have proceeded smoothly. After registering under the jurisdiction of Omega a company called new-Gentek, the first specific technology designed for alien Metazoa, the Medi-Gel, was released first to the three major mercenaries of the Terminus systems, the Eclipse, the Blue Suns and the Bloodpack (using relation with Urdnot Wrex). This preparation of genetically engineered protoplasm and nanotechnology allows near instant cell regeneration upon application to a wound of a sentient organism. Guided by the quantum computation architecture that is referred by the citadel races as the Soul, the Medi-Gel technology uses an internal store of energy and material that comes with the preparation under quantum super-position to recreate any missing/damaged structure of a sentient organism, collapsing and materializing into fully functional, non-anomalous cells that repairs even lethal wounds to un-wounded conditions stored inside the organism's mind within a minute, effectively granting Human-level regeneration upon application. The Medi-Gel technology is therefore just like a time machine, but for living cells of a sentient organism.

The Citadel initially refused it on the ground that it used genetic engineering in it's creation, but as the few law enforcement agents guarding the border with the Terminus Systems, especially Elium suffered multiple severe defeats by the newly enhanced pirates that came from the Terminus Systems, the Citadel is forced to adopt the Medi-Gel technology, exchanging it with the standard Communication Buoy technology used by the Citadel Races in the construction of their Extranet.

CODEX: Portable Gate

Since the dawn of history, Humanity have been trying to recreate the teleportation effect of the Gates, or Mass Relays as called by the Citadel. However, even after the invention of the Hyperdrive, the mechanism behind the Gates was still yet to be reproduced without the use of Element Zero.

This, however, have all been changed since technology exchange with the Citadel have brought Humanity the Citadel Races' Mass Relay Communications Buoy technology. A Communications Buoy is, in many respect, a miniature Gate that creates a mass-free corridor of space-time for beams of radiation/particles that carries information to travel between system nearly instantly.

While the Citadel Council have yet to refine the Communication Buoy technology to be able to transport macro-scale matter without shredding it to fragments the size of molecules through the extreme tidal forces that exists inside the corridor, for Humanity, this limitation turns out not being an issue at all-Information is carried through the Communication Buoy network as beams of radio waves, light and particles. Radio waves, Photons and Subatomic particles can carry energy (and also mass). Macroscale matter is a compilation of mass, energy and information. It is therefore, possible to deconstruct a macroscale object down into it's constituent molecules/particles, send the particles/molecules, information about the object and energy that is needed to reconstruct the object through one or multiple Communication Buoy corridors, and then reconstruct the object at it's destination, using said particles, energy and information.

For most of the Sentient races in the galaxy, this process of deconstruction and reconstruction require complete observation of every particle in said object, therefore it's quantum state. Since observation destroys the quantum superposition that is needed to maintain the consciousness, or Soul of a sentient being, sending a sentient being or an actual A.I. through such a teleportation device is no different from killing the being on the one side and creating a clone on the other-not ideal for anything that has a soul. Especially problematic under the current Citadel Laws regarding cloning and artificial intelligence, let alone Murder.

However, since it's adoption by the Human civilization, such a limitation turns out to be easily resolvable-Since the Human mind is based on Bound states rather than Superposition and entangled states like other sentient beings in the galaxy (scholars still debate whether Humans are truly Sentient), an individual Human being is simply the fully classic, comparatively low-capacity/small information stored in it's macronuclear genome. This means that unlike other sentient organisms/A.I.s, teleporting a Human through the use of Communication Buoys will not kill it/make a clone of it in the other side like it would for other sentient race.

This new application of the same old Communications Buoy technology by Humanity is known as the Portable Gate.

In application, however, even this information is often abridged/ignored-the same mass-free corridors of space-time created using the Communication Buoy/Portable Gate technology is, more oftenly, simply used to transport raw material and energy across long distances-the material is sent as a stream of molecules/liquid/gas, and the energy is sent as a beam of light. Even though information is also sent using such a system, it is seldomly used to send the information that is actually used to fully reconstruct any object to the exact state as it started with-Blueprints and even Minds can be sent through a Portable Gate, but never the complete representation of an object's state in the term of the positions and velocities of every atom inside it, as it's both unnecessary and impractical-the design blueprint of a Human Construct holographically encodes the (often multi-kiloton) construct in atomic precision through the use of canonicalized trees and recursive designs, while by itself only need to be slightly larger than the description file of the modules that comprises them. And even entire Human Minds is only about a few TB in size. Easily handled through existing forms of communications.

(Why the Citadel didn't know about this? Honestly, I don't know either. Maybe Bioware just overlooked this fact when they made the second Mass Effect game. just like how they bungled with the appearance of the Protheans in the Third game when compared to the First and Second. We all make mistakes. let's just pretend that the Citadel is yet to discover this fact. Humanity here also had the knowledge from the Orphaned Gate that they took apart in the last chapter. Maybe that knowledge is what allowed Humanity to discover this overlooked use of the Communication Buoys.)

EVOLVED: Consume

Due to the chaotic nature of Metazoan life, exact replication of such an organism have proven difficult-at least until a Salarian called Mordin Solus have, through multi-decade research, figured out a way to canonically represent the full biometric information of any Metazoan in a string of numbers 128 bits in length. Earlier infiltration missions, using a Generative Adversarial Network to create lifelike representations of lower researchers followed by observation/imperfect consumption, which take days to finish, have revealed to humanity certain archives of the Salarian STG, which includes this research made by Mordin Solus.

Using the methods outlined in this research, and through experimentation and errors in the Terminus Systems, Humanity have finally perfected the way of deriving this number from the genetic information of any metazoan they have consumed, or even just touched. And the algorithm to recreate the biometric information and appearance of any individual from this 128-bit number that is obtained from it's genome.

Coupled with an existing QuickScan algorithm that was used to obtain the structural and spectral information of an organism while it is being consumed/a surface while it is being moved over or touched, as well as a specifically designed special purpose biocomputer equipped by every EVOLVED that records the victim's neural pattern and emulates it several thousand times faster than real time, an EVOLVED that have consumed an individual can now nearly accurately copy the appearance of said individual down to clothing, post-gestational markings and even genetic modifications. Except certain internal features that is only present in a Human Construct/body, which may be detected providing the right instruments. As well as gaining access to nearly all active/non-subconscious memories of the victim. Within seconds. This new technology allows EVOLVED to become nearly perfect infiltrators. One that could even infiltrate the Collectors and the Reapers if provided with the opportunity.

Mobile Construct: Whipfist and Whip launchers

Despite the creation and widespread use of the Impulse technology, the traditional Impulse drive based tractor beams have limitations-namely, the gravitational wave based remote momentum transfer system have a distinct maximum force per unit mass affected per watt of power used. Which means that objects that had a powerful enough propulsion system in terms of force per unit mass could escape an Impulse beam, and an Impulse drive of a specific power can only produce a certain amount of force against an object of given mass. This means that an Impulse Drive powered spaceship/construct have a distinct maximum acceleration that is dependent on the local concentration of gravitational mass, even if the spaceship could technically produce much higher acceleration given specific power, interact-able mass and reference frame.

In order to overcome this stiffness problem, recently, a special class of momentum transfer technology that is based on physical matter (strings, ropes, tethers and cables) was developed and miniaturized to be fit for use on small ships and Human-scale mobile constructs. This class of technology is known as Whip launchers.

By itself, Whip launchers are incredibly simple constructs-a hook, which is attached to a cable, which is reeled on a winch.

However, it's the actual construction/realization of said systems that makes this technology an one-of-a-kind invention in the entire galaxy.

The Hook itself is an incredibly versatile system-from a simple grappling hook, to blades (like Kratos), to harpoons, to anchors, to sticky pads to an actual hand-on-a-rope controlled through neuroelectrical/mechanical/optical/hydraulic linkages within the cable; the Hook part must be incredibly durable yet remain versatile enough to be able to attach to an object without breaking loose.

The Cable is a marvel of nanoengineering-most forms of Whip launcher cables are constructed of a monolithic, single continuous Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotube (MWCNT), with some specialized version making use of Collagen, Para-aramid fibers, Boron Nitride Nanotubes and even Diamond nanofibers-with a tensile strength ranging from 40GPa to 400GPa, these cables are rated for use in Space Elevators-that sadly got replaced by even cheaper Impulse Drives before they could be even realized.

The Winch, which is the most complex of the entire system, is far more complex than just a reel with a handwheel on it-even though that could still work. Modern Winches make use of a complex array of reels and nozzle-plates powered by some of the Strongest molecular/electric/hydraulic motors known by Man. Tensile fibers, control cables and power lines are mounted, separately, on different individual reels, which rapidly unreels as the Hook is launched through centrifugal motion, electromagnetic force or gas pressure toward the target, braiding the various fibers into a durable cable on the fly. As the user retracts the Cable, the mechanism runs on the opposite direction, unbraiding the cable while simultaneously reeling in the constituent fibers onto the different reels with forces that could often accelerate the entire mass of the construct it was currently mounted upon with an acceleration in the order of 10^2 m/s^2.

The Whip launcher allows Human mobile constructs and bodies to perform maneuvers that wouldn't be possible through the use of Impulse Drives alone, especially under dogfight/close quarter combat conditions, leaving an impression of Spider-manning in the eyes of other races in the Galaxy.

(They clearly knew what a grappling hook is. at least in Terraria.)

(One solution to the Fermi's paradox is that the vast majority of Alien civilizations diverge too quickly too early in history mathematically and technologically from us to the point that it will be next to impossible for an alien civilization to have the exact same technology base as us that we can reliably predict and know how/what to detect. For example, the vast majority of alien civilizations are extremely unlikely to discover and use Radio waves, since it requires the Maxwell's equations which are based on the Axioms of our system of mathematics. and for the ones that DO use radios, it's unlikely that the frequency range they use in their Voice broadcasting (the only kind of alien broadcasting we can reliably distinguish from noise) will overlap with the narrow range we are currently using for SETI. Or that they will be broadcasting sounds in a frequency range we can hear or reliably interpret using instruments in their radios. Or that they will be broadcasting their voices in the AM/FM format that we can reliably listen/decode without prior knowledge using our current SETI instrument. Or that they will be broadcasting in Voice/music/sounds/Using sound to communicate at all. Humanity in this work clearly belongs to the first kind. I bet that they must be feeling extra-alone in the times before their discovery of the Prothean ruins on Mars.)

(The current effort is more like SEHT (Search for Extraterrestrial Human Twin) then SETI(Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence).)


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

(As for the question that whether these Humans are synthetic or organic, the answer is both and neither. The primary method of manufacturing employed by Humanity is Gene translation-the sequential synthesis of biopolymers and rigid molecular framework structures encoded on mRNAs using a high-tech equivalent of the Ribosome. The same process that is used to construct their technology is also the exact same process that they used to construct their own cells/bodies. The process of advanced translation, in-Universe, have evolved and have been improved/expanded multiple times throughout the course of evolution that ultimately cumulated in the creation of the sapient Ciliophore that is the equivalent of Humans in this specific AU. From simple proteins to crosslinked proteins, then to complex, rigid nanostructures that weighs often in Gigadaltons, the actual process of translational evolution is essentially a process that improved upon the predictability of the 3-dimensional structure of the translational product based upon it's building block sequence. As the same process of manufacturing is employed both in Human technology and in Human physiology, you are right that they are at least synthetic in some extent-as biology is really just really complex synthetic chemistry. But in the same time, this highly advanced process of nanomanufacturing have a completely natural origin from Evolution-in that respect, these Humans are also entirely Organic. Since the actual mechanism of nearly everything in Human biochemistry is vastly different from that of either the Citadel Metazoa or the more "traditional" Synthetic races like the Geth or the Reapers, we can say that they are also neither synthetic nor organic-an outlier just like nearly every member of the Kingdom Alveolata in Real Life-They are an entirely separate class of lifeforms that is different from either canonical Synthetic life (robots) or canonical Organic life (Metazoa) of Mass Effect.)

(These humans are basically a race of naturally occurring nanomachines-neither synthetic nor organic, more like something in between. This is what it means to be "blurs the boundary between synthetic and organic life".)

**Citadel Council: What had we done...** **2145 A.D.**

With the Portable Gate technology now in the Axopodia of Humanity, a massive revamp of spaceflight and weapons technology have been under way in Human space. Starting from the fwe experimental Atlantean spacecrafts, the Portable Gate technology is first experimented on two dreadnought-class test vessels, Vega #1 and Vega #2, which successfully transmitted energy from the Vega Light Harvesting Facility to the spacecrafts in real time, both in the form of Bosons(light) and in the form of a stream of protons-antiprotons, within a range of nearly 100 light years. The only drawback, however, is the fact that the Portable Gates (still) can not be used during Hyperdrive transits-a sizable store of energy is still necessary for any vessels that are intended to travel across different star systems. After these initial tests proved the viability of the Portable Gate technology in transmitting energy, other tests have been conducted in the transmission of matter/raw materials. Despite the initial implementations only being able to transmit one molecule at a time, further improvements of this technology through exhaustive experimentation and recursive optimization by the Redlight/Whightlight industrial-research complex eventually improved the diameter of viable matter transmission tunnel of the Portable Gates from below 100 nanometers to almost 0.6 meters in size-enough to send intact cells, bult raw materials and even Constructs across different Portable Gate-equipped spacecrafts and facilities-just like the Transporters from Star Trek, or the Stargates from Stargate. At this rate of transmission, a single Portable Gate device could transfer up to 14.13 m^3 of any matter per second for each tunnel, nearly instantaneously, across a distance of almost 500 light years through most forms of obstacles. In order to send even higher volume across different spacecrafts, simply use more tunnels on the Portable Gate devices-experimental arrays can contain up to 272 tunnels in a hexagonal close-packed shape containing 10 tunnels per each side, allowing matter/raw material/fuel/energy/coolant communication of up to 11487.69 m^3 per second-enough to reconstruct a Dreadnought-class vessel within 30 seconds.

As most of Humanity's spacecrafts are retrofitted with Portable Gates and a galactic-scale matter-energy transport network is built within Human space using Big Gates and Small Gates alike, the final gap between the Astronomical levels of Human supply ability and the Negligible levels of Human spaceship matter/energy consumption is bridged-as long as the Portable Gate device within the ship is left intact in the first hit, no matter how much Biomass that shot managed to tear off, a Human vessel could regenerate, using materials sent through their Portable Gate devices, into it's complete, full-massed version that does not even show signs of ever being hit, within 20 seconds (for most ships)/30 seconds (for Super-dreadnought class vessels).

The ability of a Human vessel to send out attacks are also improved-no longer bound by fuel reserves, any weapons that Humanity had on ships that used to be only be able to fire sparingly, or for a certain amount of times, can now be fired nearly-continuously-energy (and ammunition) sent to the weapons system through one set of tunnels, and a coolant loop through another set of tunnels carries the waste-heat away back into enormous Heat Disposal Units stowed away safely within Human Space between stars to be radiated away.

However, the most frightening Human invention after the acquisition of the Portable Gate technology are the first True stealth spaceships-the "stealth" spacecrafts used by the Turians, the Salarian STG and most of the other races on the citadel all relies upon the use of Internal Heat-sinks-heavy, hard to maintain and easily saturated to the point that most "stealth" spacecrafts of the Citadel races can only manage to stay under stealth mode for at most 4 hours before needing to dump the excess heat or risk cooling the crew. Human stealth crafts, however, uses the Portable Gate technology to establish a coolant loop that links to a separate Heat Disposal System/ Heat Disposal Facility stowed away safely in a place that the likely enemy monitors of any specific mission could not reach either physically or through their sensor systems, which radiates away any of the Waste Heat produced by the spacecraft unnoticeably outside of the detection range of any likely Enemy spacecrafts, telescopes nor monitors, eliminating the last and only true obstacle against stealth in space.

Since Human spacecrafts uses Impulse thrusters that does not produce any exhaust, the use of the Portable Gate technology have made Human stealth spaceships all but completely undetectable by even the Salarians and their STG sensor stations/vessels-not even a Sentry Array (Stellaris Megastructure) could detect these stealth spacecrafts, especially if their Coolant Loop was linked to any of the public Heat Disposal Facilities within Human space, which scrambles and masks the temporal signature of Heat production for any single spacecraft that are currently using them, rendering detection through heat-flux analysis all but impossible.

Infiltration of the Asari space and their Prothean-derived archives, thanks to these new true stealth spacecrafts, have returned more disturbing results-all ancient manuscripts and date files have pointed out a mysterious race of Old Machines, called the Reapers, descending through the citadel, which is an enormous Gate that links to Dark Space between galaxies where they hibernates for most time of a 50000 year cycle, to harvest every sentient organic race to extinction in order to provide enough materials for their 50000-anual round of reproduction. And the Harvest of this 50000-year cycle is already overdue.

Despite scholars in Human space give little chance of Humans being involved in this 50000-anual cycle of Reaper harvest and reproduction, as Humans themselves, all four different species, are probably not sentient by the definition of the Citadel; New data that revealed the relationship of the Reapers and the Gates, or what Citadel races call "Mass relays", have Humanity (metaphorically) shuddered-It's likely that the Reapers will harvest every race that activated and used one of these Gates, sentient or not, and a poll across Human space suggested that no cell have accepted that being stuffed into giant iron-cans the shape of an oversized Hypotrich that are compelled to do nothing other than to maintain the cycle of Harvest and reproduction for the greater Reaper Hive Mind as an acceptable outcome of the next Reaper Harvest.

"We have to stop them if we still want a future"

Consensus have been reached by the 1.554e+29 cells that comprised all of Humanity.

A cold war of resources buildup and technology development between Humanity and the Reapers have started.

**Sur****'****Kesh, 2145 A.D.**

Soverign, or Nazara as called by Humanity and the Geth, was in full crisis mode-the signal that are supposed to activate the citadel have failed, the Geth have abandoned it and sided with the Humans, Saren Arterius was fired by the Citadel Council due to the "incident" humanity done to their fleets in their first contact. All it's original pawns, deactivated and rendered useless even before it had the time to use them.

However, as one of it's few remaining agents, the Shadow Broker, returned reports from Salarian space, that Human Infiltrators, which had the Code Name EVOLVED according to the Shadow Broker, was in an active process of infiltrating the Salarians STG and the Asari, threatening to expose their top-secret information about the Protheans and the hidden secrets about the Asari and the Salarians' own history; Soverign had it's own plans.

After almost 2.8 months of Indoctrination and infiltration by it's own agents into the elusive Salarian Matriarchy, the annual meeting of the Salarian Matriarchs, the highest level of government assembly within the Salarian Federation, would be the key point in turning the entire Salarian Federation against this malformed, soulless, semi-synthetic, microbial Infection that called themself Humans.

Councilor Valern:"This is our annual meeting of the Salarian Matriarchy. However, this is not the point of this meeting."

"According to our STG agents, what the Citadel Council assumed to be an entirely peaceful, enigmatic race, the newly contacted race that called themselves Humans, are in fact anything but peaceful."

"We have got information from our STG leader, Bubol Uzik, that, almost 85 percent of Salarian installations have been Infiltrated by at least 6 EVOLVED, with one third of the other 15 percent being Infiltrated by at least one. We have estimated that up to 99 percent of the Salarian Federation's secrets have been compromised by these shapeshifting monstrosities that called themselves 'Humans' that the Citadel Council, which was still behind their own wishful thinking, accepted as a part of the Galactic society."

"Show me the tissue sample left behind by one when our ally, the Shadow Broker, assisted us in eliminating them from the Sur'Kesh #45 Basic Research Facility on our OWN HOMEWORLD."

Irborth Yonmorni walked on-stage, putting a glass tube that holds something that seems to be a piece of shattered Opal, onto the stage. Hidden instruments rise from the edge of the lectern, and a holograph of the same piece of 'tissue sample' enlarged 4000x is projected onto the middle of the space above the Salarian Council.

Irborth Yonmorni selected a small part of the Hologram with her Omni tool, and a detailed display of almost 240000x magnification of a detail on the opal-like fragment replaces the full hologram.

On the display, was something that are more akin to the top-down view of a big city than to the interior of a cell-nanoscale wires form a orthogonal lattice that were dotted with numerous devices of unknown use, some resembled the miniature versions of the industrial machinery the Salarians knew in everyday industrial manufacturing, some resembled mechanical components similar to that of a MEMS device, some resembled diodes, transistors and other semiconductor devices, while the majority of these minuscule devices are completely alien even to the eyes of a Salarian-there were no technology, macroscale or microscale, that the Salarians knew about, had devices nor components that resembled these nanoscopic devices.

"Nanotechnology. This is what the 'Humans' on the most basic levels were consisted of. These structures are exactly the same as the structures we use in our computer chips. Far more advanced, but the design principle were the same." "Our Quantum Entanglement Phenomenon Detectors, devices that we originally developed to aid in the Citadel Council in eradicating any form of A.I.s in Citadel space, which are supposed to detect the presence of Sentience itself," Irborth Yonmorni typed something on her Omni tool, projected a hologram of the entire Salarian Council Building which had a bright, orange point of light on it where the brains of each of the Salarians currently seated inside, but with nothing on the piece of tissue sample that is currently being held on top of the lectern, in the middle of the myriad of Instruments that are used to analyze it and display it's details. "Have not detected signs of a true quantum sentience within any of the Human units nor Constructs within known space-from the small units like the WALKERs which the STG scanned during one of their assisted Construction Project near Ilium to the astronomically huge structures around the stars in Human-controlled star systems which were scanned by an infiltrating STG stealth-ship and sent back through QEC communication before it gets discovered and then vaporized by the system's defenses, even the EVOLVED themselves, which we assume to be the Humans' true form."

"This means that the entire Human species, or Faction, or Infestation, whatever, was completely non-sentient-they are basically rogue VIs just like the Geth, only so powerful and dreaded by the Citadel Council because of the technology base of whatever race that created them in the first place was simply too high- All our theories about intelligence have suggested that a True Quantum sentience is absolutely vital to the ability for any species to innovate- that's called the Spark Of Genius." "And since these 'Humans' does not even have the basic substrate for producing this Spark Of Genius, which means that they must be completely incapable of Innovation-" "In Reality, these Humans are all CHEATERS! THIEVES! Whatever technology they currently had must either be from the Protheans, or stolen from other races in the Galactic Society-like US!"

"One more evidence suggests that the 'Humans' were artificial," Irborth Yonmorni opens the container that held the "Tissue Sample" and smashed it on the ground, the piece of opal-like material seemingly broke splashed everywhere, Irborth Yonmorni told the camera crew to focus on the small mess of broken glass and splashed biomaterials, which have started to regroup and reform itself on Camera into it's original shape. "Is this very phenomenon we are currently seeing-No Organic races, The Krogans and the Vorcha included, had tissues that reformed itself every time, even when isolated In Vitro. Only Omin tools can achieve this level of and rate of construction/reconstruction".

"So?" Councilor Valern asked

"Report to the Citadel about Humanity's hidden violation of the Citadel Convention and their True nature as rogue VIs like the Geth, and get the entire Council fleet to either try eradicate their presence in Citadel Space, or at least attempt to block them behind the Afterlife d***ed Relay 314 that they came from."

**2145 A.D. Eternity lounge, Ilium**

Matriarch Aethyta: "Finally, a race that had the same dreams and envisions as me. Welcome to the last group of awake people in the entire galaxy, Shapard."

Alan Shepard: "Never thought that you Asari could meld even with microbes. Its a nice time to meet and talk with you."

Matriarch Aethyta typed something on her Omni tool, and sent a blueprint of something to Alan Shepard.

"You can have this blueprint of our failed proposal to the Asari Republic about building our own Mass Relays to make our little corner of the Galaxy more accessibile. Just a gift to prove our lasting friendship. Hope that your race will make my proposal a reality soon."

Alan Shepard uploaded the blueprint to a nearby Human civilian vessel, which sends it across a chain of Portable Gates on the Human ME network all the way back to Human Space.

An analysis result about the plan soon become available, and a surprise rushed through both Alan Shepard's mind and his emulated Face.

"Ilos? The Conduit? The Gate Monument on Presidium Citadel is an actual Gate?"

"The Asari knew about the Reapers all the time? Then why they didn't react as they should?"

CODEX: the Mass-Energy network, or ME network

Communication Buoys, or Portable Gates, are used by most members of the galaxy as a mean of instant faster-than-light communication by acting essentially as a Gate for information.

However, after the realization that information are carried on carrier waves that are themselves also contain significant mass and energy, the Portable Gate technology have been adapted, modified and intensively optimized to transport Raw Materials and Energy in addition to information in the Human Civilization, making them the equivalent of Transporters or Stargates of the Human Civilization.

Even though one Portable Gate device can only connect across two points in space no more than 500 light-years away, by daisy-chaining and networking together pairs of Portable Gates with other pairs of Portable Gates, or even a full-scale Gate, the range of a stream of materials, information and energy, or Matter Stream, can be extended essentially indefinitely. Today, most of the transport of Raw materials and Energy is done through this ever-growing network of Portable Gates, which had the suitable name of a Mass-Energy network, or ME network in short.

The ME network is consisted off two types of nodes-Network nodes and Terminals. A Network node contains Portable Gates that are pared with more than one destinations, while a Terminal contains Portable Gates that are paired with only one destination-which can be either another Terminal of a Network node.

When a User/Network node/Terminal needs to send a Matter Stream toward another connected point in the ME network, it first sends off a "ping" package through it's Portable Gate, which gets duplicated at it's next stop and sent towards the Nodes and Terminals that node is connected to, with a single number, called the "distance" increased by 1, the nodes that recieved this packages from this previous node does the same thing to the package that got sent to them, the cycle repeats until the intended destination node is reached. The destination node, upon accepting the connection, sends a confirmation package across the network, which got sent through a series of nodes that records the "distance" number of the incoming request for connection toward the node with the lowest recorded "distance" number for the request package. This confirmation package finds the original sender automatically, bringing the detailed map of the nodes en route with it, which the source node can not use to send the actual Matter Stream across-each of the Network nodes that were in between the source and the destination automatically routes the Matter Stream toward it's target using the source-destination information that are recorded during the transmission of the Confirmation package, and a ME network connection is now established.

The ME network allows all Human constructs large enough to fit a Portable Gate inside, to essentially share Resources, Energy and Cooling power-allowing the different facilities to specialize: for example, an extraction station could be situated deep inside the atmosphere of a gas giant, getting it's needed energy from the ME network while exporting the extracted material into the ME network; an energy harvesting complex could be situated in anywhere around a star regardless of the geometry of matter/energy transportation, by sending the Energy it extracted into the ME network and receiving any materials needed for it's maintenance from other, more specialized facilities linked to the same network, removing the need of the complex transportation/logistic systems and the corresponding extra hardware that would otherwise be necessary. Spaceships can now stow their big, heavy and vulnerable power and heat management systems safely inside a more specialized stationary facility that is safely hidden/tucked away from any potential threats, often being inside Human Space themselves, which means that all the freed-up space and mass that have to be lugged around onboard the actual ship can now be dedicated to uses that are actually needed to be on the mobile ship itself-like tools, freight space (for anything that isn't raw materials , information or energy), passenger cabins, crew space and weapon systems.

In other words, the ME network allows Human space constructs to work together like the organs/cells in a true multicellular organism, just like the Vascular system of Archaeoplastida and the circulatory system/blood vessels of Citadel Metazoa. Humanity have grabbed the fruit of Multicellularity, not by an evolutionary accident, but through their own exhaustive screening and recursive optimization, plus a tiny "gift" they got from negotiating with the races of the Citadel.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7-Nazara, the Eden Prime Incident, and how a Reaper taste like**

Eden Prime was one of the newer colonies Humanity got from citadel through bribery and infiltration-a planet with many intact Prothean ruins, many of which contains Intact tech and other ancient data files in regard of the Reapers, which Humanity hope to gather in order to optimize a specific resistance force toward them.

The discovery of the Portable Gate technology and the construction of the ME network have catapulted Human Development and expansion in their quarter of the Galaxy for over 1500 years in terms of progress-and no cells of Humanity thought that other samples of alien technology, nomatter how simple nor how mundane it's original purpose is, wouldn't do the same through technological merger and co-development.

Plus, there may be something the Protheans left behind from their battle with the Reapers, that may be useful against the looming Reaper threat.

A research facility have been set up on one of the biggest Prothean ruins on Eden Prime, an ancient city that vaguely translates to "Hope" in Prothean language.

**2145 A.D. Hope, Eden Prime**

The news of the Hope research facility, the colony of New Hope, finding their first major breakthrough in Prothean Archaeology-an actual, working Prothean Beacon, inside the depths of the city of Hope, spreads through the Human ME network. Unfortunately for them, a very disgruntled female Salarian have also knew about this event, as well as a very pissed-off Old Machine. Both decides that they should not take any chances before the colony of Eden prime finishes it's Light Harvesting Facility, sealing the system off from any potential invaders with defenses that literally as strong as an entire star-not even an Old Machine could withstand an attack like that and survive, let lone finish any mission that would potentially classify as a raid.

Irborth Yonmorni alerted Nazara waiting just outside the Sur'Kesh system, a stealth Reaper Transport picked up the Salarian Matriarch as well as more than three platoons of Eclipse Mercenaries, and they both left toward Eden Prime at a velocity of nearly 30 light-years per day. A speed that was nearly on-par with the Human Hyperdrives.

Initially, a GOLIATH that was transporting minerals from the planet's newly opened mines to the major Colony/Prothean dig site noticed a fireball streaking across the sky, the next second, a beam of Red light ripped the un-shielded (None of the Human technology nor constructs had Kinetic Barriers-that tech wasn't obtained from an exchange with the Citadel, yet.) GOLIATH into multiple small pieces, spilling it's cargo into the ocean. The Biomass quickly reassembles, and alerted the Colony about a premature invasion on this new, immature colony through every communication channels the crew could think of. This time, it's not something that can be easily swatted down like the Turians used to be back during the Gate 314 Incident. The Enemy have chosen to attack in a place that has yet to set up it's defenses.

**2145 A.D. Omega, Terminus systems.**

Alan Shepard was talking with Aria T'Loak about potentially buying the Omni Armor and the Stationary Kinetic Barrier Generator technology from one of the many illegal tech dealers in the Terminus Systems, when someone rings on Alan Shepard's Omni tool.

"Attention to all Human Fleets in Citadel Space, Eden Prime was under attack! I Repeat, Eden Prime was Under attack!"

"I have to go." Alan Shepard finished his talk with Aria, left an Extranet contact number, before transforming into a stream of organic tissue and synthetic components and hopping into the nearest ME terminal which have now been installed in much of the Terminus Systems-one of the exchange conditions with Aria T'Loak for the Shielding technology possessed by members of the Terminus Systems. Still early beta, but spacious enough to handle most form of small cargo transport.

"So weird." Thought Aria T'loak. Human Constructs, like the various Construction models from a WALKER to a GOLIATH, even ones that were specifically designed and sold to members of the Terminus System Races, as well as the Humans themselves, both as individuals and as crew of one of the many Infrastructure installations and Construction teams, are not a rare sight. Aria have already know that they are a race of semi-synthetic shapeshifters, just as most of the Terminus Systems Inhabitants know about. But there is still something that surprises even Aria every time they change their form, mostly when the current task they are doing requiring a better body structure/form to continue more easily. Like when they encounter tight gaps and small holes that their current form couldn't squeeze into. Yet there is something that always intrigues Aria T'loak in the process of Human shapshifting as the Biomass of a Human, any Humans she have seen so far, Individual or as part of a larger Construct, simply liquefies and reforms into the needed shape, complete with all the components Aria assumed to be Synthetic (Cybernetic). something that even their Omni tools couldn't do in this time-scales.

After being bounced across more than two scores of ME nodes, including at least 5 Major Gates, his Matter Stream being split into more than three separate parts and regrouped in at least two occasions (not pleasant even to a human.) Alan Shepard arrived at ShanXi, frontier station of Humanity to the larger galaxy one Gate-jump from Eden Prime, and slipped into his position in one of the many Military and Defense vessels that have already gathered there.

"Welcome Back, Commander Shepard"

Arcturus #14, Vega #5 and Proxima #201, as well as more than a dozen other ships and vessels swarmed through Gate 314, appearing at the Gate orbiting Eden Prime's star 25 Astronomical Units away.

The (comparably) small fleet charged their Hyperdrives, disappearing from normal space in this position and reappearing just above the atmosphere above the city of Hope on planet of Eden Prime.

Anderson: "A Salarian Matriarch, Irborth Yonmorni, assumed to be under reaper Indoctrination, have raided the Prothean Dig Site of Hope on our newest colony world, Eden Prime. The large, black ship she have presumably arrived on, was of clearly Reaper design. Ground teams, retrieve the Prothean Beacon before Irborth gets to it, kill the Salarian if necessary. Orbital Fleet, try disabling the black ship with as little damage as possible. ME network access will be fully enabled on your transport as well as this entire fleet. So make sure to stay in the power transmission beam of your transports as much as possible. We will open fire once the ground teams have secured the Beacon. Security team, assemble a Sandbox to contain the mind of the reaper and try extracting any information from it once we Consume it's insides. But do it safely, make sure to physically isolate the Sandbox once it's finished, and DO NOT CONNECT the sandbox to the ME network in any occasions in any way."

Transport vessels, each about the size of the Kerbal X, an ancient rocket design during the Space Race, detached from the bottom of Arcturus #14 and Vega #5, using their Impulse thrusters to slow themselves down during the descent, they descended smoothly through the atmosphere and come to a soft landing in the outskirts of New Hope.

Alan Shepard, driving a medium-sized BRAWLER with Kaiden Alenko and Ashley Williams, emerges from one of the transports. Behind his vehicle, other ground teams driving either HUNTERs, BRAWLERs and even JUGGERNOUTs could be seen. There is even an EVOLVED riding on top of one of the HUNTERs. But that is not an ideal configuration for a quick strike team like this...

"BRAWLER Omni Armor activated"

"Equip meat-cutters on the HUNTERs"

"Equip the experimental weapon on the JUGGERNOUT. Hold your fire-use it on Nazara, once in range and by fleet command."

On the back of the enormous JUGGERNOUT that gets transported down to Eden Prime with it's own Transport vessel, what looks like a Whip-launcher with an oversized syringe as the projectile could be seen emerging from it's Biomass.

Small gas-bag like creatures got trampled on by a random BRAWLER and exploded like a popped balloon, but none of the Ground Team members, nor their vehicles/drivers, have seemed to notice them.

"11.2 km away from target"

The group of Macroscale Constructs that looked more like a horde of beasts than a company of vehicles continued to run toward the location where the Prothean Beacon was discovered. Mercenaries of the Eclipse platoons brought by Irborth Yonmorni showed up, rockets and mass accelerator rounds flying toward the Horde of Mobile constructs.

Unfortunately, lack of Kinetic barriers doesn't mean the lack of defensive power-as the Eclipse rocket troopers realized before being Consumed. The majority of Human Constructs, from "Vehicles" to spacecrafts, are surrounded and protected by a layer of cross-linked monocrystaline graphite-trillions of layers of graphene that are cross-linked between layers through the use of Kovengel Condensation between places that are intentionally left unzipped, forming a continuous, monolithic structure that is harder than diamonds and stronger than anything the galaxy ever knew about-the bulk tensile strength of this material reaches over 500 GPa, higher than even the cables used in the Whip Launchers or the Hypothetical cable strength that is needed to build a space elevator. The high velocity metal jets from the exploding Rocket-Propelled-Grenades deflects off the armor harmlessly, mass accelerator rounds shattered on impact leaving only small dents, a mercenary attempts to stab one of the HUNTERs with her Omni-blade in a last-ditch attempt to at least damage one, only to find her Omni-blades got bounced off and fell off from her arm before the unlucky Asari is Consumed alive.

The Larger BRAWLERs and the JUGGERNOUT are equipped with Omni armor-one of the many technologies exchanged from with Aria T'loak on Omega with the construction of a Metazoa-cargo-safe version of the ME Network for the terminus systems. These technologies works by suspending hard materials just above the surface of the user (nomatter the size) using a precise controlled gravitational field produced by Element Zero-forming a type of Whipple Shield (Spaceflight) that can be easily replenished as new pieces of the hard material could be manufactured with an Omni tool fabrication module, or in case of the Human version, Bio-assembled from raw carbon-containing Biomass on the fly to replace the worn-out and broken pieces that had taken damage from an attack (mainly projectiles, but also effective against blunt-force attacks). This technology allows the larger versions of the Human Mobile Constructs to emulate the effects of a Kinetic Barrier-or "Shield" as called by the other races in the galaxy. One that is even more effective than an actual Kinetic Barrier in the sense that the Omni armor can also block blunt-force attacks, melee damage and "attacks that are slow enough to not trigger the Kinetic Barrier generators".

"500m from Target"

The Prothean Beacon is now in direct sensor contact of Alan Shepard and his team's BRAWLER. just beside the Prothean Beacon, Irborth Yonmorni could be seen guarded by a large group of Eclipse mercenaries-even multiple gunships could be seen hovering around.

5Kg mass accelerated rounds start to fly toward the ground team, annihilating a few HUNTERs in the front line, although all the ground team crew have backed up their Macronuclear Genome and majority of their Biomass in the orbital fleet, so they can reload-respawing from an earlier point in their machine state history.

Noticing that these 5kg rounds, known as M-950 Cain, were able to cause actual damage to the vehicles and constructs of the team, the BRAWLERS in the ground team relocated to the front of the horde, and activated their Omni-shields. Just like the Omni armor they are equipped with, but much higher and wider, and also thicker&costing more energy to maintain. A chain of Constructs left behind in a train that links the Ground Team to their transports acted as relay stations, relaying the energy beam sent through the ME network toward the Team using multiple beams of microwaves.

"Ready laser weapons, shoot em!"

What looks like large eyes appeared on the team's HUNTERs and BRAWLERs, and a concentrated beam of blue light emerged from every and each of the "Eyes", each beam hitting and vaporizing an Eclipse mercenary in seconds. Kinetic Barriers did not work, as laser light is massless and does not carry any kinetic energy. Some of the Mercenaries had Omni armor equipped, which ablates away and stopped the laser fire momentarily-but only momentarily. With extended illumination, even the Omni armor are ablated away completely, and the users got vaporized (or turned into charcoal) by the intense laser energy just like other Eclipse Mercenaries. The Asari Biotics of the Eclipse mercenaries didn't stand a chance-Biotic barriers are based on the same Mass Effect kinetic barriers are base upon, which means that they, too, can not block the massless photons of high-intensity laser light. Once the various Eclipse mercenary installations are within range of the ground team's laser weapons, the battle became a single-sided slaughter-the large gunships slagged by laser fire from the JUGGERNAUT, the turrets and the Omni-armored mercenaries vaporized by blasts from the BRAWLERs, while other members of the Eclipse mercenary are either turned into Asari or Salarian sized and shaped char briquettes by concentrated laser fire from the HUNTERs, or are torn into tiny pieces by the various melee weapons and close-quarter weapons of the Ground team's Constructs/vehicles and then Consumed, often while their tissue cells were still alive. (...The fear... adds spice.)

The rate of losses in the Ground Attack Team have been reduced to next to nothing as the BRAWLERs blocked the projectiles from the Eclipse Mercenary using their Omni-shields, and as the defending Mercenaries are turned into pieces of charcoal, additional Biomass for the Ground Team or clouds of carbon vapors rising into the clear blue sky. As the Ground Team turned Irborth Yonmorni into another cloud of carbon vapor and entered the small square where the Prothean Beacon is, Alan Shepard extended a tendril from the BRAWLER to interface with the Prothean Beacon...

Suddenly, a stream of red-hot molten metal shot out from Nazara, which have landed on the background in front of the Ground Team, hitting the Prothean Beacon and turning it into a pile of smoldering rubble. Then other jets of molten metals scraped across the horde of Constructs, vaporizing many HUNTERs and BRAWLERs in the process.

"Omni shields up! Protect the Experimental Weapon! Prothean Beacon destroyed by Nazara, requesting Orbital Support!" Shouted Shepard on the data uplink to the orbital fleet.

Anderson: "Ready sandbox. Prepare to recieve data on terminal #201 and #240. you are now authorized to fire on Nazara as many as possible. Stop by my command."

The fleet in orbit launched multiple beams of extremely powerful, pulsed laser onto Nazara, Kinetic Barriers once again failed to stop anything as the Photons themselves were massless. Whatever the purplish-black material the Hull of a Reaper is definitely a good absorber of laser light, as bursts of plasma have started to appear on the hull of the Old Machine, burning into the purplish material deeper and deeper.

Nazara tried to fight back, but the limited swiveling range of a Reaper's main gun means it couldn't reach the source of laser fire which is behind it with it's streams of hot, fast, molten metal. Holding back it's tentacle-like appendages, Nazara fired it's thruster and attempts to escape.

"This is Commander Alan Shepard, Nazara is trying to escape! I could see the thruster openings from my angle, Vega #5, fire at those thrusters! The targeting coordinates are..."

Nazara suddenly fell a loss of lift and started to fall back down, as the same pulsed laser fire that managed to pass right through it's Kinetic Barriers without even getting weakened or refracted, ablated it's STL thruster assembly off it's frame, leaving not even a wreckage that could be salvaged in it's place. The Old Machine start to lose it's altitude, and smashed down back onto the ground, crushing many of the tall Prothean buildings in the City of Hope.

"Don't worry about the ruins anymore. We can get all the needed data once we consume that Old Machine and get it's memories directly out of it's mind! Fire at the face of that thing, cut a hole into it's front hull and Disable it's main gun!"

Nazara, tumbling onto the ground as it's thrusters are now gone, suddenly found out that it's main gun was in the right angular range to shoot at, or even disable, the source of the pulsed laser fire in the planet's orbit. However, before it could finish charging it's next shot of fast, molten metals, another pulse-train of laser energy arrived at the place where it's "eye" is, turning it's Main Gun turret into a cloud of plasma and hole on it's face. The uncontrolled release of the already-built up stream of hypervelocity liquid metals blew Nazara's front panels right off, exposing the delicate machinery inside. Some of the components, which looks like tubing with glowing dots on them, had transparent windows with what seems to be brain matter flowing through them.

"Launch the Phagocytes!"

The weird syringe-like projectile on the Whip-launcher of the JUGGERNAUT shots off it's launcher with gas pressure, with a long cable trailing behind, the projectile flew toward the now open front half of Nazara, only to be bounced off by an invisible barrier.

"The Kinetic Barriers of Nazara is still active! The projectile containing the Phagocytes got bounced off! Request precision fire at coordinate ... Disable the Kinetic Barrier Projectors!"

Another pulse train arrived onto Nazara's outer hull, turning a small knob of something into a cloud of plasma, leaving a hole behind, another pluse train arrived into a piece of machinery in the opened up front half where Nazara's main gun used to be, turning it into another cloud of plasma and another hole on the bundle of tubing, eldritch fluids spilling out of the severed tubing where the device used to be. Another pulse train arriving at another location, and another, and another, each turning a device on the outside or the inside of Nazara into another clouds of plasma and more and more severed tubing and holes in the hull. More and more fluids start to spill out of the holes left behind by the laser blast, the lightning and the lights on Nazara's hull become dimmer and dimmer, until what could be best described as a sudden burst of compressed air and sound of something shattering emerged from the wounded Old Machine, a burst of unknown energy emanating from just outside it's hull, and what seems to be a layer of energy that temporarily got visible have shattered and disappeared.

"Nazara's Kinetic Barrier is down! Reload the Phagocyte and launch again!"

The projectile that was blocked by Nazara's kinetic barrier, is reeled in by the cable that were attached to it, sliding back into place on the launcher on the JUGGERNAUT's back.

Aiming once again at a place where the brain-matter-like fluids could be seen coursing through Nazara's inside, the JUGGERNAUT once again launched the projectile, this time, however, the projectile did not get bounced off by a layer of invisible barrier, and stabbed straight into one of the tubes on Nazara's insides.

Billions of cells, programmed to consume as many of the cells inside this eldritch fluid as possible, and upload the information about their makeup and connection with other cells into the Sandbox through the cable connection and then through the data uplink toward the fleet in orbit, rushes out of the tip of the needle of the syringe, and starts to munch on Nazara's inside. As the cells consumes the organic parts of Nazara and uploads their information into the Sandbox to Fleet Command, the cells also starts to divide-reproduce themselves to better find and consume every single bit of brain tissue that were coursing through this monstrosity.

The white, opaque material inside the tubes started to glow a bright blue as the organic material gets oxidized, the clear as the original cells that inhabited it are killed off and Consumed by the phagocytes. The lights on Nazara's hull first goes out, and the gets brighter and brighter, this time a brilliant cyan-blue color instead of purple just as the beam of light that functions as the data uplink of the JUGGERNAUT to fleet command gets visible, then brighter and brighter. A blinding flash occurred in the place where Nazara used to be as a shock wave rocked the ancient city as an explosion shrouds Nazara's crash site, leaving behind the frayed end of the cable connecting the Phagocyte projectile to the JUGGERNOUT. What used to be a 2 kilometer, neigh-indestructible capital ship shaped like an oversized Hypotrich have now exploded into thousands of large fragments and millions of small fragments that rain down everywhere in the ancient City of Hope.

On Arcturus #14, the neural pattern of the organic parts of an Old Machine is reconstructed, using information derived from the Phagocytes consuming it's insides. A decoder is derived as the Sandbox performed thousands of different simulations on the neural pattern, and the memories of Nazara is now being decoded and downloaded in Human-readable form from the simulation inside the Sandbox by the terabyte.

"Ilos, The Conduit, The Keepers are the gate-keepers of the Citadel Gate to Dark space. The Mu Gate is gone in a supernova. Indoctrination plans on the current galactic civilization. The collectors was behind the Gate Omega #4."

"Plans for the Gates, the details about it's IFF, hidden protocols about it's use, activation and deactivation."

"Reaper Kinetic Barrier generators. Dark Energy perpetual motion power core of the Reapers."

"The four sentinels of the Reapers in the galaxy? not just Nazara?"

"So, apparently, the Old Machines are called 'The Reapers' in their own language. And there is a true A.I. on the citadel called the Catalyst. Reaper harvest was not originally meant for reproduction, but to 'Preserve' sentient species from their own A.I.s..."

"By first Indoctrinating them to the point that they thought that perpetuating the cycle of harvest was their most important goal, and then cram their brain-cells into new Reapers to function as it's brain? I could appreciate that logic. If something as faulty and illogical like that could be called 'logic'."

"We don't have an A.I. problem since we are already partly A.I... so why the Reapers still think like that?" Thought Alan Shepard.

"Maybe the Catalyst is actually a very, very, broken, V.I. that refuses to acknowledge it. Plot course to the Citadel."


	8. Chapter 8

**2146 A.D.**

A storm is brewing in Citadel space, but so does a stream of innovation within Human space.

From data salvaged from Nazara's Consumed memories, the first Reaper FTL drive core is created-despite it's reliance on Element Zero, the Reaper FTL drive core proved to be almost 2.5 times faster than the fastest Human Hyperdrive ever created-and it's self-powering nature also means that there is no need for additional fuel during transits, where Portable Gates can not connect. After several thousand rounds of Intensive directed evolution (and quite a few violent blue explosions within Interstellar space that were used as the testing ground), the newest hybrid of Human Gravitics-Reaper Mass Effect drive technology-the Tartarus drive core, have been created, and were fitted onto vessels that absolutely needs it-exploration vessels and battleships. With a maximum FTL speed exceeding 4000 light-years a day, the Tartarus drive core is almost as fast as a real Gate-about 1 100th of the speed of these Devices, yet still almost 100 times faster than that of the Reapers, and almost 200 times faster that of the Citadel.

The Portable Gate system/ME network gets an upgrade as well-With Blueprints of a real Gate salvaged from Nazara's Mind, some of the major technological hurdles within these devices have been solved-quite easily. What used to be able to only send streams of light and particles of a quite narrow diameter across have now become real, miniature Gates that can send materials En Bulk-the only limit was the total mass of the material being transmitted through a ME linkage at one time, which is presently being limited to the size of a large JUGGEERNAUT, or a (very small) spaceship. Vehicles and Shuttles of the Citedel Metazoa can now also be transported across the ME network in one piece, instead of one part at a time as needed the older Portable Gate devices.

Also, the Thanix main gun of the Reapers, which also happened to be found within the Consumed memories of Nazara, have also been extensively studied, modified, and coupled with a stripped-down version of the Reapers' Gate technology, and the product was terrifying-it was called "The Gate Buster", and for a reason. Within this newly created weapon system, particles, matter or antimatter, which was suspended within a mass-reducing field just like the Reapers did to their charge of molten metals, was blasted with a train of high-intensity pulsed laser, which accelerates them in a wake-field process up to speeds that was unimaginably close to the speed of light-up to a teraelectronvolt per particle for a device about 1m in length. Once these particles leaves the device, however, instead of just releasing them as is, these particles were instead fired through a corridor of Zero-Mass FTL space created using a stripped-down Reaper-Enhanced Portable Gate device that had it's destination set to WITHIN the target of the beam-the beam of particles, each with unimaginable amount of energy and momentum, decelerates, bypassing all shields and armor, into Real Space Inside their target, hitting and damaging the soft insides of the target directly without even interacting with the hard exterior. And the stream of particles themselves is so energetic, most of the Irreplaceable material choices that are required for constructing most of the Internal Devices of nearly every spacecraft so fragile (and easily denatured/cooked when exposed to large amount of energy/high levels of heat), that even a single well-aimed shot could completely cook a Reaper from the inside out like a lobster inside an Asari household microwave. Or turn the drive core of a Dreadnought into a ball of superheated, radioactive plasma and the structures around it into blobs of white-hot, evaporating molten metal. All without even bothering the Armor/Hull and the Kinetic Barriers/Shields of the target.

One Downside of Reaper-derived technology, is, of course, it's simply too expensive, Element Zero wise, to use on a larger scale, even by the Humans, which is by now a type III civilization thanks to the near complete envelopment of the stars and utilization of their luminosity/radiation/power output within their entire quarter of the Galaxy. Except for the Portable Gates, which was merely a technical update on the existing devices and the plans of any new devices that would be built-no more Element Zero required than what each of the current ME network devices was already using before the update.

**Collector Base, beyond the Omega-4 Gate**

Harbinger was extremely depressed-losing Sovereign to the Infestation that called themselves "Humans" literally in it's first attack was already extremely bad for the Current harvest plan for this Cycle, Now these nasty "Humans" have cracked open Soverign's skull and got every secret of the Harvesting Cycle and every tech the Reaper had as their trump card against the Organic Races for each Harvest right out of it's Organic Core Mind, destroying it in the process-the Reapers have completely lost their surprise factor and technological superiority to the "Humans" after just their first attack on an Immature Human World. The Catalyst is still locked out of their Hive-Mind that by the tampering done to the citadel done by those Damned Protheans in the last Cycle-it have became impossible for the reapers to even obtain technological upgrades this way, which they usually did with the help of the AGI within their Command Center whenever a technologically superior race showed up and threatens the Harvest.

Oh. The Citadel. Due to a certain treaties placed down there by the other of it's vanguards within the Galaxy, Shadow, and, by extension, the Shadow Broker, Human vessels are technically not allowed to deploy in the numbers that would cause an surprise attack on Citadel itself to be repelled if conducted correctly...right?

Deploying all six Collector Cruisers, as well as calling back the Seventh from the Terminus Systems as called by the Civilizations of this Cycle, using the Reaper IFF on the Mass Relays to maintain stealth, Harbinger threads the entire collective might of the Collectors towards the citadel, in a surprise attack that would, Hopefully, Capture it, remove the Prothean Tampering on it's systems, free the Catalyst, and, hopefully, open the Mass Relay toward Dark Space and complete this Harvest early, overpowering the "Humans" using both the sheer numbers of the Reapers' Might and the Intelligence of the Catalyst combined-It won't be worse than the Zha'til war three Cycles before, and the Reapers always wins. Hopefully.

_How wrong Harbinger was._

**Stealth Recon ε Eridani #118, Widow system**

"Detecting multiple signatures exiting Gate 3 at speed of 351 kilometers per second. Size...Cruiser sized. Optical signatures matching that of the Collectors."

"They are opening fire on the Citadel Fleet!"

"ME connection through Gate 2 toward Human Space stable, calling reinforcements..."

"A preliminary strike team will arrive within 2 minutes from Shanxi, Major reinforcements would arrive within 6 minutes from Sol, Arcturus. The Sirius fleet and the ε Eridani fleet... due to the lack of Gates within their space, with Tartarus FTL it would take at least 15 minutes just to reach the nearest Gate, and an additional 12 minutes to arrive at the scene."

**Citadel, Widow system**

Asari Councilor: "We have a surprise attack by the Collectors! Evacuate the council to Destiny Ascension, Close the Citadel Arms!"

One of the Collector vessels, using a backdoor that have already been hard-wired to the Citadel's systems during it's construction, sent a signal to the Citadel and caused the arm mechanism to Jam-the Citadel is Opening instead!

The 5 fleets patrolling the Citadel scrambles to fire on the Collector vessels, but the shots bounced off harmlessly on the Biotic barriers on the surface of the Organic-looking Collector Cruisers. Oculus drones are released, many shot down by the Citadel Fleet's point defenses. Fighters were deployed from the Turian and Salarian Carriers, and the space between the two fleets are quickly filled with explosions, fires, mass accelerator shots, torpedoes, lasers, streams of molten metal, particle beams and dog-fighting fighters and oculi.

One of the Collector Cruisers fired it's main Weapon-an enormous particle beam weapon that sliced through a Turian Dreadnought with ease turning the former into a large firework in space, draining nearly half of the Destiny Ascension's shields as it's residual power struck the Flagship of the Citadel fleet. The Collector fleet is merely 24000 kilometers away from reaching the Citadel, which refuses to close no matter how the Asari and Salarian operators attempted to force it to do so.

Another collector vessel fired, and what used to be the pride of the Citadel fleet is sliced into two pieces of malformed, pyramid-shaped fragments that quickly exploded into two balls of light and two clouds of fiery debris, taking the Council with it.

A third Collector vessel fired, this time on the Citadel Tower where the Council chamber was, blasting a hole into the chamber, and what looks like boarding pods left the vessel, accelerating into the breach. within 30 seconds, the pods would have reached into the hole in the Citadel Tower, and would presumably interface with the hardware there directly and capture the Space Station from it's very core.

Turian Commander Maxibus:"All fleets aim at the boarding pods-We can't let them to land on the Citadel!"

GARDIAN lasers and rapid-fire mass accelerators on the Citadel ships rained down shots and energy onto the pods, while the C-SEC announces the residents to retreat toward designated shelters-stray shots that may damage the buildings and cause civilian casualties are no longer considered or avoided in the bid to stop the Collector boarding pods from reaching into the now wide-open Citadel tower. So far, none of the boarding pods have successfully landed on to anywhere on the Citadel Tower or the Presidium-some crash-landed onto the wards, and intense ground-fights between Citadel forces and the Collectors have been begun.

"20,19,18,17,16,15,14,13,12,11,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1"

As the collector vessels started to decelerate for their final approach and capture of the Citadel, the first Human reinforcements, Shanxi #207~#750 have arrived. Activating Hyperdrives almost as soon as they left Gate 2, the reinforcing vessels-frigate to destroyer-sized, have suddenly appeared in between the Collector vessels.

Equipped with the same kind of high-power pulsed lasers used to cut open and gut Nazara in the siege of Hope, Eden Prime, these small defense vessels fired pulse-trains of laser energy in a pin-point accuracy, disabling what looks like Organs that creates and maintains the Biotic Barriers surrounding the Collector vessels-one by one, the invisible barriers of energy around the Collector transports and cruisers became visible and shattered. Even before the Humans showed up on their visible-light communication frequency toward the Citadel fleet telling them what to do, the Citadel fleet Commanders immediately knew what to do.

Carnivus: "Aim the main gun at the One Collector Cruiser that had lost it's shielding, and Shoot the s**t out of d**n thing!"

25kg mass accelerator rounds, each flying at over 3 percent the speed of light, hurled toward the now exposed collector vessel, and punched gaping holes straight through it's central core. The Cruiser shuddered a little, explosions bursting out from every seam and joint, before the entire thing exploded in a blinding flash of light-the Human vessels temporarily jumped away to avoid being hit, but the few Citadel Cruisers nearby was not so lucky-the shockwave pushed a Cruiser onto one of the wards, smashing it onto the structure and flattening buildings several blocks wide. It's only due to being evacuated into shielded shelters beforehand, did most of the residents of that few Blocks survive being flattened by the impact.

Nearly fell over due to the intense acceleration of his Dreadnought being hit by the shockwave, Carnivus Octaso quickly opened fire on another Collector Cruiser whose Barriers have been disabled by the Human Defense Vessels. Massive fireballs torn through the Cruiser, and it starts to fall, smoothly, onto the Dhakira Ward on the Citadel.

It was already too late. Despite the focused fire on the boarding Pods, one managed to puncture the Presidium-and, worse off, it punctured through the "sky" of the Presidium right in front of the elevator that would lead to the Council Chambers on the Citadel tower. Collectors spilled out from the front of the boarding pods, some took a terminal away right from the Keeper that used to operate on it, the Keeper melting down in response; The Collector then took a connecting plug on a wire from the back of it's body, plugging into the terminal, the Holographic displays turned from yellow to red, while a progress bar, labeled "Prothean Tampering Reversed: 0.01%" have appeared instead of the unknown symbols and gibberish that used to fill them.

Other collectors punched straight through the elevator door ignoring the lift cabin within, and more than two dozens of them have started to climb the walls of the elevator well, professionally, toward the Council Chambers on top of the Citadel Tower.

The Dhakira Ward have started to be flooded with more and more Collectors that spilled off the wreckage of the Collector Cruiser, The little Security forces C-Sec could put up fails to stop the Invasion of the Citadel, as if all hope in stopping the Catalyst and the Reapers' return have failed.

Another 4 minutes have passed since the first Quick Strike Team from Shanxi entered the battlefield.

From Citadel Gate 2, the main fleet from Sol and Acrturus have arrived-tens of cruiser-sized vessels, each powered by the ME network through an internal Portable Gate Device with more output power than an entire sun-like star, making a jump toward the Battle Field almost as soon as they arrived through the Gate.

Acrturus #201 took Aim at one of the four remaining Collector Cruisers, high-energy laser pulses accelerated a stream of Antiprotons to tens of teraelectronvolts per antiproton, entire stream carrying more energy than one million hiroshima bombs, all within one one millionth of a second. The stream of particles are then sent toward the center-of-mass of the Collector Cruiser at superluminal velocities through the zero-mass corridor of spacetime created from a Portable Gate.

The lights on the Collector Cruisers quickly went out, before explosions ripped through it's insides, releasing more energy than 70 1883 Krakatoa Volcano eruptions combined. or about 0.325 ton of Antimatter annihilating with equal amounts of normal matter-the intense burst of radiation sterilized everything on the Wards, killing every Collector and every unshielded Organic on the surface-which is basically saying, all collectors that currently boarded the wards, since the Inhabitants of the Citadel have by now, all retreated into Shielded vaults under the surface of the wards, safe from the effects of radiation.

Sol #107, Sol #109 and Arcturus #804 took aim, and each of the Gate-Buster stream turned another Collector Cruiser into a brilliant flash of light and a radiation-filled ball of plasma with energy equivalent of more than 13.9 Gigatons of TNT each-no solid materials, Citadel, Collector or Reaper in origin, could withstand even one one millionth the might of an entire star.

Maxibus: "Airspace cleared-Presidium recording Collector invasion, Dispatch the ground teams to fight them! There aren't many left!"

**Within the Presidium**

As a local ME terminal suddenly sprang to life, streams of Biomass-both big and small, are ejected from it, which quickly forms more than 8 HUNTERs, 4 EVOLVEDs and numerous WALKERs as they solidified onto the floor of the Presidium.

The Collector, which is currently operating on the terminal, with the Progress bar displaying "Prothean Tampering Reversed: 54.82%" more than half-filled, suddenly felt a intense sensation of heat from it's backside, before being turned into a cloud of vaporized carbon-water and a puddle of molten metals by laser fire from one of the HUNTERs.

The few Collectors that remain are vaporized by laser fire, some attempting to charge at them using a variant of Biotics-something that Humanity also can create using Impulse technology, but never Element Zero due to it's high cost-and only to be shredded into bits by the various close-combat weapons equipped by this small team of Redlight Indivuduals, eaten by Phagocytes within them, and it's genetic structure fully analyzed within seconds.

"Four-stranded DNA structure made entirely off purine derivatives...Just like the G-quadruplexes within our own Telomeres...But cellular buildup still of Opisthoknot origin. I could even see the fusion gene CAD being encoded here... Just like every alien species we have consumed and/or analyzed. Why?"

Alan Shepard, from one of the HUNTERs: "I see the Lift toward the Citadel Tower wrecked... The Collectors may have already entered the Council Chambers?"

Turian Boarding Team Leader Tiberitius: "We have arrived at the Council chambers in citadel tower-No Collector in sight. Though the sounds coming from the life suggests more than 450 collectors, even more, are climbing up the shaft."

Alan Shepard, with the small team that squeezed through the ME terminal and killed the Guarding Collectors and their hacking team in the presidium just before they could bring the Citadel Gate and Catalyst Back Online, split into two-One part, Ashley Williams, Kasumi Goto and Miranda lawson, shifted into a swarm of single-cells that starts to trace the access record of the Hacked terminal alongside wiring of the Citadel's internal systems. The Other part, Alan Shepard, Scott Ryder and Jacob Taylor (The only Blacklight Individual that volunteered in the team), used Impulse thrusters and Whip launchers (equipped with sticky pads as the hold-fast device) to quickly climb up the elevator well, hoping to catch the collectors in time.

The trace team, which have seeped straight into the "Hidden area" of the citadel, after tracing around the hacking signal past a device that could only be assumed to be a physical Firewall, found a large amount of structures-structures that are completely enclosed within physical firewalls that are vastly similar to the first firewall the hacking signal was apparently trying to breach, or bypass-which was impossible anyway due to there is literary no connections between the enclosed structures and the larger system outside that are not connected through at least one of these physical firewalls.

Realizing the nature of the enclosed structure may be the "Catalyst" the memories extracted from the mind of Nazara was referring to, the cells of the trace team quickly regrouped, a linkage formed with the outside world, and carefully sent the coordinates of every device isolated by the Prothean-created firewalls within this place, which included no less than 250 Data Cores of different design, and a Blue Box-the core, brain and heart of an A.I., in relation to the Citadel itself to the Human fleet waiting on the outside of the Citadel, and called the full bombardment of the location.

"Assuming Direct Control"

The Climb team have located the collectors-and despite the powerful Biotics the collectors possessed, the Climb team simply disintegrated into millions of voracious Phagocytes, each controlled by it's own Impulse Field, and coated every Collector within the shaft-seeping into their organic armor, and start to consume the weak, Opisthoknot-derived animal cells within.

Harbinger felt his connection with the Collectors weaker and weaker, as one by one, the organic parts of the collectors were eaten away by the Phagocytes of the climb team cell by cell, and the synthetic parts that Harbinger could still directly control, corroded away by the Oxidase enzymes secreted by the cells and crumbled into nothingness. When a Collector IS being superheated to temperatures that the cells could not get close to as Harbinger is controlling it Directly, somewhere within the swarm of cells, a Laser device formed from regrouping cells, and the entire animated cybernetic construct that was the directly-controlled collector was melted down into a cloud of metal vapors and a small puddle of molten refractory materials.

Just as the Climb team eradicated the last collector that were climbing up the Citadel Tower's elevator shaft, the full mapping of the Catalyst and the Hidden Area was finished and transmitted toward the newly arrived Human Dreadnought, Sirius #19 by the trace team as they evacuated the area. The Dreadnought fired it's Gate-Buster at the lowest energy levels it could manage, and what used to be the Catalyst and the entire Control System of the Citadel Gate was now turned into a cloud of glowing plasma, the rest of the Hidden Area that used to host the Core of the Reapers' Hive Mind melted down into a lake of still-evaporating molten metals by the intense, armor-ignoring stream of high-energy particles. Which have started to pool on the bottom of the Citadel tower and started to slowly leak out from the seams as a shower of red-hot particles that signified the Catalyst's defeat and the complete destruction of the Reaper's Hive Mind.

_Harbinger: __"__All the plans. For nothing. Ready the Contingency plan-we will start the harvest by FTL__'__ing to the galaxy by ourselves. Call Shadow back to the Collector base and don__'__t forget to bring the destination relay within Dark Space with us-I want it completely refitted against the weaponry of the __'__Humans__'__, and get it to fix and open the Citadel Relay as soon as possible, while we would still arrive in the galaxy within 2 years, even if Shadow__'__s plans have failed.__"_


	9. AN EVOLVED HUMANITY CHALLENGE

**ANNOUNCEMENT: EVERYONE AN EVOLVED CHALLENGE**

Hey everyone,

This is a challenge for everyone who enjoy reading mass effect first contact AUs like Biknota, ME meets ST, Dark Forest and Biomass Effect, and was interested in stretching your imagination in writing alternative versions of Humanity in space-related games and fiction.

So here is your challenge: Write a story set in any universe as you want, with the major Human faction replaced entirely with Evolved from [PROTOTYPE 2]- make up your own reason that turn every Human in your universe into an equivalent of James Heller of [PROTOTYPE 2], with the ability to eat/absorb entities into themselves and obtain the appearance and abilities/properties of the absorbed entities, of which they can express/transform into/use at will. They should also be able to heal themselves by absorbing mass- Which kind of mass and how much they could heal through absorbing it is for you to decide.

Be creative in the limits and scope of your own faction- the entities your Evolved can absorb could be anything, ranging from living organisms only to everything that is made of matter. As long as you have a proper justification of the ability within your setting. With enough justification, the Evolved could even be able to develop their own forms/abilities through scientific processes- the use of technology is not prohibited, but encouraged. I would love to see how your Evolved manage to integrate and recreate technology using their own means- especially with their own Bodies/Mass.

The exact reason for turning every Human in your Universe/Story into an Evolved could be anything, as well as their microscale structure and body composition. It could be a disease like the original Games, a genetics experiment, nanotechnology, energy/space/time manipulation, magic, or any reason you could think of. With enough justification, you could even write an AU where the Evolved possessed the aforementioned powers naturally through biological evolution or being created as such (Like my story Biknota). Justify your reasons and the exact in-Universe.

The Evolved should be able to store up to a certain amount of mass-how much they can store is up to you, but make sure to justify the limits (or lack thereof) in-Universe. The original Alex Mercer or James Heller would explode in a fireball of degenerate electron plasma the instant they appeared within our universe, or the universe of Mass Effect. For example. In-Universe Justification, for example, by refinement of biomass in the chapter 2 of my Story Dark Forest: A Black, Viral Fate, should be used whenever your Evolved absorb or store Mass above the limits imposed by in-universe limits such as Volume and Density. It could be a technology, or a genetic trait, or magic, or whatever, but it must be sufficiently justified in-Universe, and (Optionally) could be increased or removed through technological advancement.

With sufficient mass, an Evolved should be able to heal themselves rapidly even when not directly absorbing anything-as long as they had enough mass to fix the damage. How rapid they heal and how much mass is needed for healing is for you to decide. But any damage, including Dismemberment and lost limbs, should be fully regenerated given sufficient mass (or other factors like energy within your universe). Again, their ability of healing should be justified in-Universe.

There should be a limit on how much could they heal after damage- the obvious one is that the mass that were used for healing must come from somewhere, and they can no longer heal once their reserves of mass is depleted. And it should be possible to kill one using some mean that you can specify in your story with proper justification- from simply depleting their energy to having to destroy every last bit of their mass. Or with other phlebotinum you specify within your Universe/Story.

The Evolved should be able to change their appearance within reasonable time-enough for infiltration and stealth to be possible on-the-fly. Additionally, if some of their abilities/powers you decide to give them (or let them obtain/develop) require a physical structure/device/change on their body, they should be able to produce, reabsorb and switch between them at will within timescales that are considered reasonable for combat. Again, both abilities should be justified in-universe.

Your Evolved should have a default appearance that are recognizable as Humans-Exotic body decoration or clothing is OK but we don't want a race of amorphous Shoggoths. If the race is Old, variations of features like skin or hair color may be allowed but they must be still recognizable as Humans. Justify the default appearance in-Universe- Especially if your race of Evolved arose naturally.

(Optionally) The Evolved could change the shape/appearance of part of their bodies to perform certain functions, such like reaching an unreachable location, or squeezing through tight gaps, or use as tools/weapons. Or to simply mix and match between different absorbed appearances and the basic appearance of the Evolved himself/herself. Justify it in-universe if you decide to add this ability.

(Optionally) If deactivated, but with mass that were still intact, an Evolved could be resurrected by a proper supply of mass and/or energy. How long can such deactivated mass remain viable is up to you to decide.

Otherwise, there are no limits-unleash your imagination and post your ideas in the comments and in my forum "Everyone An Evolved Challenge" on Story- [PROTOTYPE].

You could also write your own story and let me know!


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